River
Four licences, twelve fish: Tywi coracle season written off
Andrew Davies has fished this water for 38 years. He called 2026 the worst season he has seen. The four men still licensed on the Tywi took 12 fish between them. That used to be a night.
Coracle pairs still drop down the Tywi after dark, net stretched between two boats of willow, hazel and calico, looking for sewin. The season is 1 May to 31 July. Salmon, when any are kept, only from 1 June, and recent byelaws have pushed salmon toward catch and release. Weekends are closed. Daylight is useless. The fish see the shadow.
This year only four Tywi licences were taken up. Davies, 63, chairman of the Carmarthen Coracle and Netsmen’s Association, remembers twelve when he started. A fifth generation man told the BBC he had one fish all season. Keith Elias has been out with him. They talk about dead fish on the water and a smell off the river. Youngsters are not queuing for a licence that costs the same and catches nothing.
The association was founded in 1938 to keep the oldest Carmarthen trade alive. In 2017 West Wales coracle caught sewin and salmon got PGI status. The badge is still on the paper. The river is not under it. Citizen tests run with Achub y Tywi have shown phosphate, nitrate and ammonia sitting high. One mid May reading hit 2.50 mg/L of phosphate, the top of the kit. NRW says it takes reports seriously and has enforcement and compliance investigations open in the Tywi catchment. Davies says they report all the time and nothing seems to move.
A festival that did not happen
The Carmarthen River Festival was pulled in June. Mayor Russell Sparks, who holds the old title Admiral of the Port of Carmarthen, said the river was dying and that salmon and sewin could be gone by the date NRW has put on some Welsh rivers, 2030. He has used the same warning at planning committee over the 84 homes at Ffordd Pendre, whose sewage would go to Parc y Splott and then toward this water. MP Ann Davies has asked for firmer action on those who keep putting muck in the Tywi. Senedd member Gareth Beer went to the association in July.
Byelaws after the 2019 inquiry already cut the season almost in half and left the licence fee where it was. The men say the cut did not put fish back. A shorter season on a dead river is just a shorter empty night.
What is left
If the four do not take licences in 2027 the tradition on this stretch is a museum label. The boats can still be shown. The net cannot catch what is not there. Housing, farming, the works at Parc y Splott and whatever industrial discharge the testers keep finding will decide that, not a press line from a coracle shed.
The Chronicle will count licences next May, and will put any NRW prosecution in the Tywi catchment on the same page as the catch numbers.