Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends we’re so glad you could attend step inside, step inside.
That’s right, Back! Back! Back!
Well sort of, because we never really went away, just maintained a self enforced silence.
After a lengthy period of uncertainty over the future of this place and concerns over whether a prospective new owner would want an online “gobshite” as an employee, a sabbatical/hiatus was taken from chucking up guff.
The house and river remain in the hands of the family who have employed me for thirty four years and the daughter of my late employer has now moved in to the house, along with an extensive menagerie.
Fishing has continued throughout the sabbatical. 2025 was particularly challenging with water levels the lowest I have experienced in all my time here. The water temperature in this stretch of the Dever touched eighteen degrees and most trout just concentrated on getting through the day. We have a small number of syndicate vacancies for the coming season. If anyone is interested, don’t be a stranger.
As I write Storm such thing or other has passed through and the river is bank high and rattling along. Aquifers are steadily being recharged, although the big pool of water in the field known across the ages as “Spring Bottom” has yet to appear, and springs about the place remain soporific at best, it will be interesting to see how they respond given a couple of months of all of this rain percolating down through the ground. I'd caveat this with the river looked in great shape at the end of March 2025, then it stopped raining for three months, the Dever dropped at a remarkable rate and we all know how the summer went. I have been operating on a reduced budget for the past two seasons, I noticed several fishermen this past summer crossing their fingers when using some of the bridges. I am now slowly replacing these, albeit in a more brutalistic style.
Water sampling is a thing now.
Once a week I fill my bottle in the recommended fashion and take it a couple of miles for it to be tested for a variety of water quality parameters. Most beats from Stockbridge up are in the same scheme and the idea is to have a database that can be used to hold the Weasels at the water company to account should they return to their old ways of knocking out dodgy date, or failing to measuring data when they are up to no good.
We have also been fitted with a SONDE (after DJ Trump.) This has a solar powered monitor that measures several water quality parameters every fifteen minutes or so, before sending its readings out into space where it bounces off a satellite back down to somebody’s computer. It’s a further trove of data to hold water company weasels upstream from here to account, and will ensure that they don’t get up to any shenanigans in the night hours, as has been the suspicion in the past.
The Andover Ring continues in the planning phase with no spades in the ground as yet. To recap, the plan is to move water from the lower reaches of the Itchen via the medium of a big pipe. Its destination will be Andover, where it will provide water for local town society and enable them to wash their cars during periods of drought. The aquifers in this part of Hampshire have been classified as “at the maximum point of abstraction if the environment is not to be impacted upon” for over a decade. However the Andover Ring won’t guarantee a reduction in the amount of water pulled out of the aquifers, but enable more and more houses to be built around Andover, which seems to be marching on Basingstoke.
There are also concerns over the quality of the water pumped into the Anton following treatment and the impact of an increase in the percentage of the river’s flow coming from treatment works and a reduction in the percentage of the river’s flow emanating from the aquifers.
When work begins, the big pipe will pass through a tunnel under this stretch of the Dever. Work on the tunnel itself will take many months and over the past few years we have been the subject of gazillions of surveys. The Environmental wallahs were a fun bunch who kept coming back and liked what they found, there were geologists and and other “ists” who looked at many things, but failed to tell us their findings, despite our protestations that if you start poking around too much in sub strata such as these then the river can sometimes disappear underground, which isn’t good for trout and grayling fishing.
Anyway, we are where we are, which is something that I seem to have said a lot of late, along with “What times we live in”
Oh yes almost forgot, Moss is still with us and will be eight in April. We have also acquired a loon called Dougal who turned one year old just before Christmas. A work in progress he’s a quirky fecker and like no Labrador we have ever had before. Moss went through a period of watching the horse racing on TV. Dougal’s pick is “Dogs behaving badly” which I am not sure is the ideal evening viewing for a dog of his nature. Pictures to follow.
I think that’s it, other than to say I’ll try and keep this going in some form of regularity now that things are a little more certain.
