28 May 2023 News/Editorial
If angling correspondents/commentators have any role at all, it is to look on the bright side, to encourage and cajole so that future chances of success, for hapless readers, are, if not exaggerated, balanced on the positive side, because, of course, with fishing, we are all optimists and, well, you never quite know.
I am finding even that low bar tricky, the sun is beating down, the forecasts are agreed on more of the same for the foreseeable future, well into June, the river is already at summer level and will continue to drop. Add to that the fact that all three (Tay, Dee,Tweed), possibly all four, to include the Spey, of the great east coast Scottish rivers (for I hear the Spey is no great shakes either), failed to catch 100 salmon (most probably many fewer than that) between them last week, you will see my dilemma in coming up with something upbeat to say.
Blaming “fishing conditions” has always been the easy fallback for those determined to portray oodles of fish, when there clearly are not. This time it really does not wash; ok the sun is shining and conditions are not easy, but the river is not that hot (nights still cool) and if the fish were there, you could catch them either early or late in the day. With river levels bigtime favouring beats below Coldstream, when only one salmon was caught there in the final five days of last week, the only sensible conclusion is that little is coming in from the sea. It must be the very same elsewhere on the other rivers.
It is never a good idea to draw conclusions, kneejerk, in the heat of the moment, but you do wonder what is happening to our beloved fish, and what more, if anything, we can do to protect them and ensure those incomparable springers continue to run our rivers? Alarmism is seldom right. We need balanced and sensible heads, and, of course, we have been here before (as recently as 2018, see below), but even so, there is beginning to be something horribly predictable about the accumulation of bad news in the Atlantic salmon’s world.
I have no answers, unlike many others, who think they have. Of one thing I am sure, killing salmon at the moment, as our only netting station is still allowed to do in April and May, is marginally offensive to those of us who love our fish and have not deliberately killed one for many years. It should be stopped, and one can only hope that this year/spring is the straw that breaks that particular camel’s back, with the Government, and that they finally do something about it.
Just one salmon was recorded as caught by all the Tweed rods in the final two days of last week, and six below Coldstream in the whole of last week, in conditions distinctly favouring those lowest beats. With such obvious scarcity, killing any Atlantic salmon can only be most profoundly wrong.
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In 2018, the parent year for 2023 springers, the Tweed catch was 727 salmon to the end of May, by a distance the worst for many years before, and since.
In 2023, based on correct figures in the main, with some estimated beat catches, but not many, the catch (sadly assuming very little for next week) will be either side of 800 salmon to the end of May, by a considerable margin, as compared to all, other than 2018, the second worst in recent times.
In many ways, this should come as no surprise, on the basis that there is likely to be some connection between the strength of the parent generation and their children (but not always, viz the 2013 autumn and successive autumns after that).
I detect dissent in the air, dissent of the hatchery kind. Knocking that particular issue on the head is always hard work, because it seems so obvious, does it not, put more young fish in the river and you will get more back?
I will not bore you with all the arguments against, but so far as the spring is concerned, the current subject of debate, I will restrict myself to just one, which is that you cannot breed springers, or at least nobody has ever yet succeeded. The evidence is that if you take eggs from springers, bring them on in a hatchery (at great expense), put them back in the river as fry, parr or smolts, it matters not, they will come back (to the extent that they come back at all) as grilse or summer fish. It has been tried; it does not work and, in the process, all you are doing is removing some male and female springers, as broodstock, from their natural environment, where the chances are they will breed more springers if left alone, into an unnatural environment, where they definitely won’t.
A convincing, killer argument, you would say? I fear not. T’was ever thus.
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Two days perambulating the banks of the glorious Test were a joy. Hampshire was in its summer’s best, the mayfly were up, the trout were rising, the sun shone and all was well in God’s world. Unlike here, the Test was as big as I have ever seen it, proof, if it were needed, that Scotland, especially the east and north, has been a lot drier this spring than normal, and than the whole of the south of England.
We caught a few, as one does, the best of all, three under 1 ½ lbs, wild brownies you would say, as they do not stock under 2 lbs. A little golf at Leckford in the morning, a light (?) lunch with about 45 others, pushing up a few zzzs after that, then the late afternoon and evening on the river.
What more could one possibly want?
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