SAPA 2022 Newsletter

Slamannan Angling and Protective‍ Association

Dear member,

As our 2022 season has come to a close, we’d like to look back over the year and share on the work that has been done on the river and some of the events we have attended.

As many of you may know, caring for our river and restoring it to it is very dear to our heart and conservation is at the heart of our Association. Its been a busy year for us and we’ve barely had time to enjoy the fishing ourselves!

Our restoration work began in January with tree planting and maintenance of the some of the trees planting over the last few seasons. Work was carried out in February with willow weaving on the bank reinforcement.

We had a great day attending the 2022 Scottish Eel Conference in Edinburgh hosted by theForth Rivers Trust. The event saw Eel specialists travel from all over Europe and the UK fordiscussions on how to better understand and conserve this precious and endangeredspecies.

This year we funded Fish in the Classroom to be delivered by the Forth Rivers Trust for Whitecross primary school. Fish in the Classroom is an interactive way for kids to learn about rivers and river wildlife, and brown trout in particular. The kids are given a fish tank and are able to track the progress of fish eggs developing into baby fish and then release them into the river. 

May saw the Forth District Salmon Fishery Board announce the 1st Fisheries Annual Gathering at Kinbuck on Saturday the 28th of May. Davy. Roy and George attended the event and did a display of our habitat and restoration work. We all had a great day and it was well run with good food, good fun and good guest speakers. Well done to Grace and the Board team. To all those Clubs who did not attend you missed a great day.‍

We were very happy to receive a grant from Falkirk council for material to make 6 kissing gates of which we supplied the man power to make. Thanks to Anna Perks F.D.C., Rab Christie, Graham Brown and John Brown for putting the extra straining posts in for us. Thanks to Jim and Anne Taylor for the loan of the gator. We have installed 6 gates so far and have 3 to go. 

We have a lot more work to do and many plans, all to help provide a better angling experience and support the regeneration of our river. But we are a small group and we would love to have more volunteers come and help us with our work, we have a lot of skills and experience that we would love to share with the community.

Over the summer a great deal of time was spent clearing scrub and grass from our young trees just to give them a chance to grow and create habitat for all manner of wildlife. We also continued to support the Forth Rivers Trust science team to electro fish the Avon and tributaries, the river Carron and the Bannock burn. Its important that we don’t just work on the Avon but to help out where we can. 

We’d like to say a big thank you to James Christie’s daughter Morna for doing our accounts for us very professionally and the farmers in Slamannan area for their help over the years. Also thanks to Grace Wilding and George Main for all their efforts to revamp our website. Hopefully we will have this up and running very soon. We will also be getting our Facebook page ready to go live over winter.

You may have noticed we haven’t talked much about the fishing, as we mentioned we don’t get nearly enough time to do it! So we’ll leave that part to you, the members to enjoy and please share your experiences fishing the river on Facebook and through our feedback form on the website. Our community of anglers mean a lot to us and we want to hear more about your fishing and see pictures of the fish you’ve caught. 

Now that the season has closed, we come to the catch returns! Catch returns are a vital part of Salmon and Trout Conservation, the data that is gathered by anglers and fisheries is used by organisations such as Marine Scotland and local District Salmon Fishery Boards to assess fish numbers and guides conservation guidelines and action. Your information on how many days you have fished and how many fish you have caught directly impacts the work organisations are doing to protect these incredible species. So please support us in our duty to protect Salmon and Trout by completing your catch return through our website as accurately as possible by the end of November so we can all continue to fish responsibly for years to come.

We’d like to thank you all for being members of our Association and hope you will continue for many years to come. We hope to even see you volunteer to help us restore the habitat and improve the fishery for angling. Please visit our website to subscribe to our newsletters, this will allow us to email you with our annual newsletter and to let you know about future events, you can also visit the website for more information and pictures of our work and leave us feedback and ask questions.

George Mackintosh,
secretary Slamannan Angling & Protective Association

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