 Hello guys, excuse the racket in the background. I'm back in Canesham Town, just outside Bristol on the River Choo, fishing a public stretch, car parked right behind me. Still the depth is the winter, so I'm fishing an ultralight set up. I've got a three pound line on reel, one and a half pound line on the hook length, and that's tied to a Camerson B540 ultralight Y hook to breadflake with a free running rotten bottom. That's on the two pound line as well, just some split shot. The only thing stopping that from coming down to the hook length is the knot, and that's because there's so many snags here. You've got a duck pond just opposite, rats swimming around, look lovely. But that duck pond means there's always a steady amount of feed going into the roach. There are a few babbling here, perch, trout, we've even had grail in here, so I'm not sure what's going to show up. Might be nothing at all because it's crystal clear. I'm not going to put any bait out because that could be a kiss of death because there's a sheer number of minnows. You really don't want them at home in on your bait and kill your swim. So I've probably got a couple of hours of light, and I'm going to be fishing with my mate Justin, who's in a couple of pegs up that way, and I think he's hoping for something a bit more sizable. There we are for Sean. Let's take him to the other side of the river. Blimey, what's that? If that's a roach, it's a nice one. Could be, you know. There's a clutch singing. It might be a small chub. We'll see in a minute. Could, of course, be a trout. Can you hear those in here? It's quite funny, really, because it just turns Justin into a chub a few and far between now and here. Keep him away from the roots, lad. Two and a half pound bottom. No, two pound bottom. Oh, he has done me. No, he hasn't. Whoops. There you go. I'll give you a closer look, actually. I'm sure you've all seen a chub before. For those that haven't, that come down here with fish, you'll get an awful lot of bass on this river. And a chub. They'll give away on that pinkanian fin at the back there. It's their big pinkanian fin. Nice chub. It's not a fish on. It's not a good fish on. That's not a snag. Yeah, that's gone. I'll just give that a bit of loose line, in case it's a fish that's taking me into the snag. Good stuff. That's on there. A bit of chopped pork. Is it? Own brand lunch and meat. Oh, nice. That's a nice one. I thought that was a big bow. I don't put torchlight on in the room. Big trek and he is. I don't know. Would you say a gain of two pounds? Or bigger than that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Two and a half. Two and a half. Yeah. Yeah, very nice. It's been a few years since I fished came to Memorial Park. It was nice to see the water flowing and it was nice to see chub reappearing. So I haven't seen many of those for a while and I was actually getting quite concerned. I got home to find an email from an old friend of mine, letting me know that about half a mile upstream, there's been a significant change in the river dynamics, the flow, which has got alarm bells ringing. So I'm now up at Chuton Place about half a mile up river to go and have a look. So downstream is flowing nicely. Always good to see a bit of water movement. But on the other side, wow. The hatch is raised fully. Right, so what do I make of that? I'm absolutely shocked. I imagine it's an intentional conservation effort. It could be because they need to do some engineering work on the banks, but I don't think so. If you've watched my YouTube channel for a while, you'll know that there's quite a few trout fishing videos of me and my ear and fishing on the river too further up. I'm going to have to go up and investigate because if it's this low here, I dread to think what it's like up river. Here we've got a massive island of silt that's been deposited and captured by all the woody debris. That's presumably a fallen tree. Yeah, there's the root fallen tree and it's picked up all the silt and strangled the river. And that's that gives you an idea of what the river is going to be reduced to. If this is the way it's going to be in the future, the river is going to be shrunk. Hi there. Sorry to trouble you to point the camera away from you. I'm doing a video on the river. It's a river that means a lot to me. I just wondered if you knew anything about the lowered water levels. Do you know anything about it? No, but I know I want to. Yes I do because I lived there. Ah, brilliant. Just a person to talk to there. Well, yes and no. I'm not on camera. I can switch it off if you like. That's fine. Just had an interesting chat with a lady who has lived next to this river for a number of years and seen it go downhill in her words over the last 20. And in her words, the river management has focused purely on pollution in replacement of everything else that needs to be done to a river that's so heavily altered by by man. That's all falling in. To my left, that's falling in. We'll walk around here a little bit further where the water's whizzed around this corner. You can see the bank stability here. That's gone. That tree will be in the river by next year. So will all that mud. This river has just gone downhill rapidly because no one wants to manage it. It's a river that needs managing. You can't feed the whole of Bristol, their water supply without managing that water downstream. The trees are falling in. The banks are falling apart. And the river is on its knees in the summer because of lack of flow. Two Valley Lake was drawn down to its lowest I've ever known it to be over the summer. And there's not enough compensatory flow going into the river to keep the wildlife going. It looks like a beach. It's just sand. Sand everywhere. Right, I'm now at Uplands Bridge. Normally this is underwater. You can see from the spit that's coming out that the water's dropped down here by at least two or three. Again, the floods in Canesham of 1968 that killed eight people were caused by debris in floods hitting a bridge. As you lower the water level down in the banks, it reduces the stability of them and increases the number of trees falling into the river. This is actually a flood issue and also could compromise the bridges. The Canesham Angling Association have had fishing rights along this river for well over 100 years I think now. Perhaps one of the most revealing things about this is the amount of pipes that I'm seeing that you didn't know were there. All putting road runoff and other potential pollutants into the river. But as you can see the banks are really steep and that's because the River Choo used to have about two-thirds more water in it. It shrunk. It's leaving these great big steep sides either side. But this is a managed river. You can't re-wild something that's got a reservoir holding back water for an entire city. So what's my conclusion? Firstly, it might be a temporary thing if it's an engineering requirement on that wall down at Chute and Place. I find it bizarre to think that they would allow the whole of this river stretch to be dropped just to do that little bit of work because what they could have done is put a bund across and diverted flow just to isolate that one little area. If it's a wildlife conservation effort, where was the consultation or public announcements? What a mess. And it's increasingly starting to look like this throughout its course. What you've got to remember is that the Choo Valley Lake is at its capacity. It's overflowing. The outspill is putting water into this river. Most of the year it's not. I'm going to go and visit the former president of Keynesham Angling Association. He's lived in Keynesham all his life I think and see if he can shed any light as to what's going on. Wow. So gone and seen the ex-president of Keynesham AAA. We both exchanged our theories as to what the cause was of the river dropping. Both speculating that maybe it was a Bruce Slavin River's trust or conservation efforts in place. After a good chat, I went down back to Choo Town Place, rang on the doorbell and just asked the owner outright whether he was anything to do with dropping the river and his answer was yes. The environment agency have given him full license to be in control of the sluice there and he can do as he pleases. He's dropped out so he can do some maintenance work on the leet and the wall that I showed you earlier. He actually seemed genuinely concerned when I started to tell him the consequences that that would have on the fish population and explained to him how it would present an even bigger issue in the summer when the river's not flowing from Overspill on Choo Valley Lake and Choo Magna reservoir. I think he actually seemed slightly concerned there. My frustrations therefore are directed at the environment agency. The environment agency have put in stocks of barbel in that stretch that we looked at consecutively for 2011-2012-2013 stocking the river with barbel. Well all those fish now have been flushed out because that bloke living at Choo Town Place is entitled just to lift the hatches and empty the river. It just blows my mind that environmental management can be placed in the hands of a wealthy landowner who happens to have a sluice on his property. Just blows my mind!