10 August 2018 News/Editorial
An early posting this week.
We are off to the Naver, as far north as you can go, arguably the driest part of Scotland this summer, like its neighbour, the Thurso, a great river... but totally deprived of its fishing potential in 2018 by drought.
They both bucked the trend in 2017, catching as many if not more than their 5 and 10 year averages.
Without water from the rain due on Sunday, we might do a little fishing in the river, but not much.
It is a great shame, but my most generous host is there for 2 weeks, so with any luck he will get some water before he leaves.
Something similar happened some years ago to a friend I happened to be sitting next to in Church at a wedding last Saturday. Arriving late on Sunday, the Naver had been un-fishably low for weeks, it poured with rain all night.
They caught 63 salmon and grilse for their week.
Such is the narrow line between success and failure in that most chancy and fickle of sports we call salmon fishing.
--00--
Who would be a fishery scientist?
Flavour of the month/year when things are good, the first to be reviled and blamed when things are not so good.
And so it is now, after 4 or 5 bad years here on the Tweed.
If there is one thing I hear more than any other from fishermen and women, it is the word “hatchery”, and the scientists know they do not work on well stocked rivers like the Tweed.
It seems that no logic, no science about juvenile capacity, not even the knowledge that just one small Tweed tributary produced some 30,000 smolts this April/May, can persuade our fishermen from their hatchery addiction as the answer to all our ills and travails.
Maybe the Conclusions (as shown below) of the paper produced by the Environment Agency in July 2004 on “the role of stocking in the recovery of the River Tyne salmon fishery” will convince those still wedded to hatcheries?
Here they are on Page 32 of the following link https://wyeuskfoundation.org/problems/downloads/Tyne%20Hatchery%20Report.pdf
In particular:
“7.1 The Tyne salmon recovery started about 15 years before the first significant returns from stocking…
7.6 Current post 1995 annual contribution of direct hatchery returns to Tyne run size and catch is estimated to be mainly between 2% and 7%
7.8 Over the period 1980 to 2000 overall weighted mean return rate ot the river (pre rod fishery) of all stocked fish combined was 0.37% “
In other words, of the Tyne returning adults, between 93 and 98 salmon out of every 100 did not come from the hatchery, but came from wild natural production.
And for every 300 juveniles artificially stocked over 20 years, only 1 would make it back as an adult
And the one statistic missing from this meagre return?
The cost of the Keilder hatchery facility.
If you are so keen on the sort of miserly hatchery returns brought out by the EA paper on the Tyne….
…...then you pay for it on the Tweed.
Except of course, quite rightly, the Tweed owners will never allow it…..because they both support and agree with our scientists
our twitter feed