'COMPENSATION water, that's the problem," someone said.

He'd spent seven hours in this Indian summer on the riverbank and had only caught one grayling. All around the bar nodded sagely.

"The gravel at the bottom of the Tees should be clean, but it's not, it's covered in this sediment that comes down in the compensation water," explained another fisherman as we stood at the Jersey Farm Hotel bar on the edge of Barnard Castle. With a beer, we were recovering from an hour-long local history talk: they, members of the local Probus Club, having endured it; me having delivered it.

Compensation water, they said, is colder and denser than normal water. It lacks oxygen but carries sediment.

The Tees is currently as low as it can go. "The river is showing its bones" is the local description and, indeed, when you look at a low river fringed by rocks that would normally be under water, it does look like a skeleton that has been striped of flesh.

Thirty years ago, before Cow Green reservoir was built, the Tees would have all but disappeared in such a dry summer, but now the "compensation water" released from the reservoir keeps it flowing.

But rather than run the water off the top of the reservoir, apparently the "compensation water" is pumped up from near the bottom. It apparently carries a cold sediment that covers the riverbed and encourages the fish to sulk and skulk at the bottom.

NOT swimming in fishing circles very often, the phrase "compensation water" intrigued me. As did "Indian summer" which crops up every time we get a warm September.

It has a plethora of derivations, most of them arising from North America where the white settlers noticed that after the autumn equinox on September 22 there was a warm spell accompanied by morning mists and hazy air.

The phrase may be politically incorrect as the native Americans were regarded as unreliable. An "Indian giver" is one who takes back a gift; an "Indian summer" is one that falsely gives the impression that winter has been put on hold.

Or it could be that the warmth encouraged the animals to forget about hibernation so there was a last chance for the Indians to hunt before winter finally set in. Another theory was that the native Americans used the misty mornings to attack the white settlers.

THE fishermen weren't complaining about compensation water; they were just commenting on it. And the summer of 2003 has been worth commenting on. Practically all the blackberries round our way had gone before the end of August; sloes were gathered in and steeped in cheap gin at the very start of September.

Last weekend's Indian summer, with temperatures touching 70 degrees, sent one colleague to Morrisons for barbecue fuel and another to Wilkinsons for some lawn weedkiller. Even though there were other shoppers strolling in shorts, they both discovered that Christmas and its fake snow had taken over the aisles.

Some say it is man's rapacious usage of fossil fuels that is causing global warming to mix up Nature's seasons; it is certainly man's rapacious nature that is causing the earliest possible start of our commercial seasons.