Wayne Pritchett on Rivers and Harbours
Twenty or thirty years ago you didn’t see any of these little egrets what you’ve got now. You know they are like a small heron and they’re white of course. I mean they were quite rare, you never seen those in the river. I mean they’re quite common in the river there now and we’ve had seals come up the river as far as the end of the Quay.
I remember when I was Vic Sheath, the old Harbour Master, in the old wooden harbour launch, there were these dolphins rather. They came up the river and two of them actually followed us right up as far as … I think it was recorded in the County Press. They come up right past Newport Rowing Club, south of that, almost to the town before they turned round and went back again, you know, which was unusual.
We had some … I came in one morning and thought, there’s a black swan there, a black swan with a pink beak, but of course I think it had escaped from the Wildlife Park out at Ryde there, the Bird Park which has closed now, but the most unusual bird I ever saw was what they called ‘Phalarope’, a little tiny bird and it was in the middle of the river and it kept … because we didn’t think it was real, it kept spinning round in circles like a top all the time.
We had some ‘twitchers’ came down and took photographs of that ‘cos they said it was quite a rarity, but the Sheath family, if you go back over the years and the County Press photographs, they found all sorts of things in the river.
They’ve had sharks in the river, even a small octopus was found in the river, further down of course.
Of course, you’ve got to remember particularly the northern end of the river Medina, there were oyster beds there for many years, but of course all that died out. There could be some there now, I don’t know, but there was a big scare at the time, in 1895 when they thought that the people were getting infected by cholera and they reckoned this was caused by them eating polluted oysters from the river.
Well that was when , all the Newport Sewerage Works was being pumped into the river, where the Riverside Centre is now, that’s why that big building is called the Pumphouse still. They used to pump the raw sewage into the river, down the river and of course it wasn’t until the Treatment Works was built there in 1895, they treated it, and of course that couldn’t cope with it so in 1937 they put a pipeline from there down to Fairlee where the current Sewage Works is. But that pipe of course was far too small and in 1991, they just put a bigger one there and it’s all treated properly now. But up in to that time of course, raw sewage was pumped into the river, you see, and that was really the end of the big oyster beds in the river. I’ve got quite a lot of information on that.
I don’t think there’s anywhere near as many fish up that river as there used to be. The usual sign is the amount of anglers you see on the river banks. I mean you go down the river banks now perhaps in the winter when fishermen like to get there to catch the fish, and you don’t see many anglers down there now, but many years ago they used to have competitions down there but they seemed to have moved away from there now, so for whatever reason, I don’t think the fish are anywhere near as plentiful.
