In 2005 when the Queen complained about an annus horribilis, I didn’t think that I would suffer the same condition only a few years later! Now, I don’t have any royal blood, and the contents of my underpants are fine, but last year I had my very own annus horribilis, from a boat fishing point of view anyway. The cause, the Great British weather!

POLLACKS
By early April, I had had three eagerly anticipated mid-channel Pollack trips replaced by herring bashing sessions in the protected waters of Plymouth Sound due to high winds and rough seas. But that’s part of the game when fishing in winter - some you win, some you lose and there was a whole summer of fishing ahead of me. On the 3rd April a BBC report predicted a “typical British summer, with summer temperatures across the UK likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average for the three months of summer.” Nothing wrong with that then, and I was looking forward to some great fishing...but little did I know...

MAY AS WELL JUST BUY A KITE

Barry Greenway catching scad when we should have been chasing pollack.

At the end of April, myself and some mates had booked an early exploratory trip for porbeagles out of Bude onboard Mantis with Karl Bennet. A few days before we were due to go the conditions were not looking good, and things deteriorated until on the day, the Met Office where forecasting gusts up to 43 mph, that’s approximately force 8 to 9, and, consequently, the end of our north coast adventure, so we resorted to a day chasing pike in a local lake. But not to worry, I had another few trips booked with Karl throughout the summer...better luck next time. But it wasn’t to be, and by the end of the summer I had had a further 6 trips including a four day journey to Alderney with WSF Contributor Jim O’Donnell cancelled due to strong winds. I was absolutely gutted and starting to feel a bit depressed with life as my fishing was restricted to chasing mullet in the marina instead of  pushing my boat to the horizon.

What about the skippers whose livelihoods depend on the delivery of charter trips? They had an absolutely dire time, and I don’t know how a large number of them have managed to survive to operate in 2009. Talking to a couple of my favourite skippers recently, I asked them how they had managed, as expected their responses were similar and pretty desperate. Karl lost 70% of his bookings on Mantis over last summer and Dave Uren who runs Mirage out of Plymouth had 60% of his trips cancelled.

I didn’t need the Met Office to tell me that this was a cold, wet summer, my darling wife reminded me every cold, wet morning as she emerged from her 4 seasons sleeping bag on our summer camping trip to west Wales (we’re going to Majorca this year!). The facts are that maximum temperatures for the UK for August 2008 were provisionally the coolest since 1994, all 3 summer months had above average rainfall across the UK, with August being the wettest and dullest month, Northern Ireland had their wettest August since 1914 and Northampton its dullest August since 1986!

STATING THE BLEEDING OBVIOUS

That’s my boy. Tom with a cracking marina mullet, but we were supposed to be hunting bass.

With the state of affairs as it was, I decided to nip back to the Met Office web-site to see what they had to say for themselves, and found a declaration that "Our seasonal forecast in April was not very accurate and we have to hold our hands up to that. It just demonstrates that seasonal forecasting is still in its infancy and we have to work at it to refine our forecasts." Well no sh*t Sherlock was my response to this, but I thought that I would do a bit more digging and try to find out what was really going on. Climate change is one thing, but why did we have such persistently strong winds during the summer of 2008?

Well it turns out that it was not only the UK that suffered during the last year, expert meteorologists around the globe were reported to have been stunned by the extreme weather and number of floods which occurred around the world, the cause of this mayhem and the reason for all those cancelled charter trips had its origin in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Computer image of La Nina, cold waters in the Pacific which were part of the reason for our lousy 2008 are shown in blue.

You might or might not have heard of El Niño, but our problems last year were a result of its little sister La Niña.  Both are large scale fluctuations in surface temperatures of the Eastern Pacific, which have a major influence on global weather patterns. La Niña shows itself as vast areas of cold water which can easily be seen in satellite pictures, and is capable of affecting the UK's weather in ways that are only now being understood...but only just and a little too late to help me in booking my 2008 charter trips!

The effects of La Niña were made even worse by a shift southwards in the position of the jet stream. The jet stream is a belt of air that races around the Earth's atmosphere, and generates and steers the weather systems. The southerly change in position of the jet stream meant that moist Atlantic weather systems were directed towards the UK which led to the prolonged and heavy rainfall which made my camping holiday such a joy. Also, the cooler water temperatures in the Pacific caused by La Nina, where at least in part the cause of the winds which wrecked my summer boating.

La Nina only occurs every now and then, and so hopefully she’s gone for a while. I am a born optimist but I’ve just got out my tide tables to help select my sharking trips for this summer, and even with my positive outlook, there is still a nagging worry at the back of my mind that the terrible summers we have had over the last two years, might be a feature of our weather in years to come – fingers crossed!