Useful Fishing Facts to Know Before You go Fish in the UK

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Useful Facts to Know Before You Start to Fish in the UK - Fish as Food

For detailed information about the salmon, sea trout and brown trout fishing seasons in Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales click Here to go to the article.

Fish as Food

Aside from the shear pleasure of going fishing and with luck and some skill, catching a few, we are blessed to have some great fish for the table in the UK and Ireland.

Brown trout are quality eating, tasting of the clean waters of their habitat, sweet and flavoursome. Where there are freshwater shrimp and snail they are wild rose pink and delicious. Sea trout, sewin in Wales (finnock, whitling and herling in Scotland in their immature stage) fresh run are an epicurean delight second to none and wild salmon, especially spring fish are food for a king cooked or cured or smoked er hum or as suchi. You should never kill and eat a gravid / coloured fish of a kelt or baggot, nutritionally they are useless but they are the future of out salmon stocks and should be cherished and returned with great care and respect

Grayling, although you should be sparing with them, are a special treat. Their name Thymallus thymallus harks to the fact that they taste naturally of wild thyme.

Less well known and more endangered are the twaite shad of Wales and Ireland and Powan (protected in Scotland) and dollaghan of Ireland

Carp in this country are quite common but are off course are too valuable as a stock fish to dine on and very unlikely to grace a British Christmas dinner table unlike on the continent. You will find that they are so highly valued you might be lynched if you kill them for dinner (especially the big fish which are worth thousands of pounds).

The same applies to Wels catfish (Silure) which have been introduced recently from France.

Arctic Char are rare and described variously as delicious and bland, which leaves the decision up to you whether to eat them or not.

Most course fish are considered unpalatable, but having never tried roach, rudd, bream, tench, barbel or chub I cannot comment. Eels are off course yummy whether as deep fried elvers, jellied or smoked. Lamprey were the downfall of some old monarch of England who died as a result of ' a surfeit of lamprey', but having seen them I have to say they gotta taste better than they look - they certainly don't look worth 'kicking the bucket' for.

Pike, perch and zander are very good eating although pike are renowned for being especially boney. They are however revered by those who fish for them and you might raise more than an eyebrow if you kill them in some fisheries.

As to our sea fish, UK waters are full of edible species: haddock, cod, whiting, ling, hake, mackerel, herring, bass, mullet, skate, pollock, coallie, turbot, halibut, flatfish like plaice, flounder, dab, sole or little nibble like white bait. The list goes on and on, I guess the only common angling species of sea fish I have heard of that is unpalatable is wrasse (until I heard that Rick Stein uses wrasse in his fish soup stock - so there you go).

There are many shark species off our coasts the most commonly eaten being the dog fish, but tope and the rays as well as the bigger sharks such as blues do make it to the table.

Oily fish are known to be so good for you, the most common being the mackeral, but we also have tuna of enormous size off our coasts with fish over 1000lbs being taken in recent years.

Whether in fresh water or the sea or running between the two we have some excellent eating fish, just be sure you take what you need to eat fresh and sod filling your freezer.

I hope you find the information above useful but please make your own checks on the fish you catch to ensure they are safe to eat and how best to prepare them.

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