Fish Rescue   

Electro Fishing With The Tweed Bailiffs

On Wednesday I was the only one in the E2E course so Alistair took me electro-fishing up at Ingram Valley in the Northumberland National Park.

The reason for us doing this electro-fishing, which I had never known much of before hand, was because the Tweed Bailiffs and the Northumberland County Council were redirecting the river so we had to save the fish (Salmon, Salmon Par and Brown Trout). This was successfully done using a technique called electro-fishing. Basically what you do is put a current of electricity in the river which stuns the fish so we can catch them easy and put them back into the original river. They redirected it by blocking off a part of the river and letting it flow into the original river because the floods caused a slight change in the river course.

I had to wear some thigh boots which were made of water proof rubber and obviously because I’d get electrocuted if I didn’t have them on. I’d never done anything like this before nor waded before, it was weird at first but I soon got use to it. I had my phone and wallet in my pockets too so I had to make sure I didn’t slip otherwise it would have messed things up. We had to be careful wading as if we put our hands in the water while the electricity was flowing through it then we would get a slight electric shock. Also one of the Tweed Bailiffs told me that the the larger fish would get a worse shock then the smaller fish due to their greater surface area. Even though the bigger salmon got the electric shock worse then the others they were still hard to catch because of their size. Some of them  would have been about 10 pounds and they were harder to get in the net, they also kept on hiding in the branches which had fallen into the river which made it quite tricky and irritating, but we managed ok.

By the end of the day we managed to save hundreds of salmon par, a few young brown trout and about seven or eight adult salmon. Obviously we couldn’t get all the fish but we tried to get as many as possible. The Tweed Bailiffs also said that I could come back and help them out again, they were proper canny too.

I would definitely do it again but I would have to remember to have my breakfast before hand because I didn’t that day and I was so starving. But yeah it was a good experience and a much easier way of fishing compared to the ordinary rod and worm fishing. Also I have done my bit for the environment which is always a good thing to do and got some good old country fresh air.

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