About eighty percent of the entire country of Denmark is cultivated and farmed, resulting in a massive need to drain the land. In the fifties most of our streams and rivers were converted from meandering and highly productive trout and salmon streams into straight, deep channels in order to quickly lead the water from the farming fields away and out to sea.

This obviously pretty much killed the foundation for our then healthy wild populations of fish, due to the fact that the gravel needed for trout and salmon to spawn their eggs in was dug up as well as sand/dirt covering what was left of spawning beds in the streams due to way too fast flowing water, now that the streams were straight channels.

Now, to make a long story short, nowadays the government has realized their mistake in the fifties and is now pumping lots of money into restoring the streams to what they used to be. So far things are going in the right direction and the fishing is pretty good in many places. There is still a need to stock a lot of streams, since they still can't produce the amount of wild fish that they're supposed to naturally. But the official policy is to end the stocking of our streams completely by bringing back the streams to their former glory.

The local fishing clubs help with this restoration. I spent the weekend learning how to do this properly. I had an awesome weekend learning how to lay out gravel spawning beds for trout, sponsored by the national sport fishing association which holds these courses to educate us anglers how to restore streams locally. The stream you can see in the video below is one of the only streams where NO stocking is taking place. We're laying out a spawning bed to help the brown trout population in a dammed section of the stream. This stream needed a lot of stocking up until five years ago, so this laying out spawning beds is really paying off. The world class sea trout fishing we have nowadays is a direct result of stream restoration by private clubs and individuals. I'm restoring a small trib of my home stream this fall hoping for similar results :)

Martin
[youtube:mjw310et]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqZsRMZJwkE[/youtube:mjw310et]