HERE’S a fishy tale for you. It wasn’t just two-legged land lovers who had their world turned upside down by the blight and bluster of Storm Callum on the weekend, some of the River Usk’s scaly and silver natives also suffered at then hands of the elemental brute.

Pictured are a few of the hundreds of fish that were found washed up a three foot section of the banks of the River Usk yesterday.

They were discovered by a young family out for a Sunday afternoon constitutional. An eagle-eyed mum spotted one of the fish wriggling and unable to watch a fish out of water suffering, she called on her partner to pick it up.

No sooner had the fish been picked up and released back into the safety of the Usk, then other fish sensing help was at hand began wriggling for attention too.

The fish-loving mum explained, “My daughter or I couldn’t bring ourselves to pick up the fish ourselves so I got my partner and our nine-year-old son to do the dirty work. There must have been over a 100 of them, and some were partially buried in the mud and looked dead. But the strange thing is as soon as they were picked up, they began leaping around like electric eels.

“I think they must have been part of a shoal that happened to have got stranded on that particular part of the bank. I’m not sure how long they’d been there but the wet mud must have helped keep them alive. I’m just glad we got them all back to the water. It felt a bit like a Walt Disney moment to be honest”

With the help of two passing do-walkers the family managed to rescue all the fish and send them homeward bound back into the watery depths of the Usk.

And who knows, the tale of the day they survived the storm and were stranded in a strange place far from home might well become a legend amongst the river creatures who dwell in the deep.