Every fish caught at Northbank is returned. Not because it makes us feel better about ourselves, and not because the fish prefer it — we are fairly sure they would rather we did not hook them at all — but because it is the only way a small, private water like this survives for another hundred years.
When Eleanor Northbank wrote the keeper’s handbook in 1968, she did not invent catch-and-release. British salmon fisheries had been practising it for decades on the Spey and the Tweed. What she did was declare it non-negotiable on a small lowland lake where almost no one else was doing it.
The logic is simple arithmetic. Four square miles of water, seventeen native species, a breeding brown trout population that takes six to eight years to reach the size most anglers admire. Take one fish home and you have taken a decade of lake-time off the water. Take ten in a season and the lake becomes a nursery for mediocrity, chasing its own tail to replace what the rods removed.
A fish that has lived in the same bay for six years is a specific fish. Returning it is an act of respect for what it already is.
There is an ethical argument too, and it is the one we are less shy about making these days. A fish that has lived in the same bay for six years, that has learned to rise on a particular evening and hide under a particular root, is a specific fish. It is not interchangeable with a farmed trout in a plastic bag. Returning it is an act of respect for what it already is.
We have made it easier to do well. Barbless hooks. Rubber-mesh landing nets. Wet hands only. Never more than fifteen seconds out of the water for a photograph, and only if the angler truly wants one — most do not, after the first year.
The catch book is our proof. Since 1997, it records the living: a fish caught, measured, photographed quickly, and watched swim away. Some of the larger regulars have been caught and returned a dozen times. They are, in the honest sense of the word, old friends.
The hardest part, for new guests, is the first time. The rest of your fishing life, we promise, is easier for it.