news/editorial

10 June 2018 News/Editorial

After another dry, warm and sunny week, with water levels again dropping to the point where only a few tops of streams are fishable, the rod catch was 63 salmon and 19 sea trout, bringing the total catch to 706 salmon and 81 sea trout for the season to 9th June 2018.

The weather pattern next week will become more mobile from Wednesday, as Atlantic depressions begin to take over from those surprisingly stubborn high pressure systems which have dominated for the last 6 weeks.

But there is not much sign yet, in the forecasts, of any serious day-long rain.

And day-long, heavy rain is not just what the Tweed needs, but just about every other river in Scotland. There are drought conditions from the Tweed in the south, right up to the Naver and Thurso in the north…..if anything it is drier the further north you go.

We all need one thing…..and soon.

Heavy rain.

--00--

What else can go wrong?

No grilse and no autumn salmon in the second half of 2017, and now the worst spring run in 2018 that most of us can remember.

Not only that, but the weather has lurched from prolonged cold and wet up to mid-April, to warmth, sun and drought ever since then.

The result?

Every Scottish river, that I know of, has caught very many fewer, often half, or less than half, of what they would expect to have caught by mid-June.

We can conclude that, despite a misguided penchant for blaming the weather, (a) there have been very few springers anywhere and (b) that the cause must be in the sea, for only the sea is common to all rivers.

Is there any good news?

Well yes.

At the River Tweed Commission meeting earlier last week, biologist James Hunt gave the interim results (interim, for smolts are still running) of the smolt trap on the Gala Water, one of Tweed’s many spawning tributaries, which enters the Tweed... surprise, surprise... at Galashiels.

The smolt trap had been paid for by the Tweed Rivers Fisheries Association, effectively a cooperative of all Tweed owners, from surplus funds collected during their association with Fishpal.

It has been operating for the first time in Spring 2018, having been constructed over the winter 2017/2018. The Tweed biologists have been very busy. At the same time they have been getting the Ettrick cauld counter, and cameras, up and running following that cauld’s total reconstruction.

The interim Gala smolt count, revealed by James Hunt to a nervously expectant body of Commissioners, was that over 31,000 smolts had come down the Gala to the end of May 2018.

If you would like to see just some of them, look at this: http://www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/?p=6189

The Gala is productive, being comparatively lowland, but very far from the longest or largest of Tweed’s many spawning tributaries.

So, if well over 31,000 smolts come out of just one smallish Tweed tributary, how many smolts will all the Tweed tributaries and main stem rivers send to sea in 2018?

And just where would you put that hatchery…. and who would pay for it, and why?

When the salmon can do it all much better for themselves.

As they have for 1,000s of years.