10 February 2019 News/Editorial
The score last week was just one salmon, making a grand total of 7 salmon to date.
All of which means little or nothing, because the first two days of the season were plagued by grue, and the whole of last week effectively flooded/winded off thanks to storm Erik and its forerunners.
Next week will tell us what is there. A friendly high pressure is building over the UK from Europe, bearing mild souwesters and dry conditions for the whole week. As the river levels drop and the water clears, fishing prospects could hardly be better...depending on how many springers are there.
Unless they got washed away in last week’s floods, what we do know, from what fishing has been possible, is that there are more kelts about than we have been used to of late.
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Those who have been keeping up with the goings on with the North East (of England) net fisheries will know that the 11 remaining drift netters will not be fishing in 2019. Nor will the more shore based T&J nets be allowed to fish for, or kill, any salmon.
They will still be allowed to fish for, and kill, sea trout.
April 1st it is not, but you will be interested to hear that a net has been devised that is reputed to distinguish between salmon and sea trout, in that salmon are supposed to be able to find their way out of it, whereas sea trout cannot. If a salmon is caught in the net, the netsmen will have to release it.
Now I am sure you, like me, will instinctively believe that such a net could possibly exist, and that if salmon are caught, the netsmen will always release them without the need for the net being policed for every minute that it is being fished.
Either this is some massive practical joke...or maybe it really is April 1st?
Certainly any ex-netsmen I have spoken to here is both unaware of any difference between salmon and sea trout when it comes to escaping a net….and find the whole idea faintly hilarious.
If only it were... for, as I understand it, those T&J nets which take place in the trial before 31st May will then be allowed to fish on for the whole season up to 31st August.
And just how many salmon will they kill in the process, either accidentally, or deliberately when no one is looking?
Presumably, we will never really know.
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Our Common Crane is still here. Omnivorous, it is forever restlessly pacing about its winter wheat field in search of whatever food takes its fancy. I saw it this morning, it has been here for 3 months now, in the process attracting a steady stream of admiring twitchers.
Just after Christmas, in addition to our normal quota of Little Egrets, we acquired two Great White Egrets, stunningly beautiful birds, the size of, or maybe slightly bigger than, a heron and prone to standing in the shallows on one very elegant long black leg, flamingo-like.
One lucky twitcher, seeking both the Crane and the Great White, on a very windy day, found them both sheltering right next to each other in the lee of the far bank of our Cauld Stream.
The chances of getting a picture, in Scotland in January, of a Crane and a Great White Egret in one shot?
He should definitely try the lottery.
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