10 May 2020 News/Editorial
And so the drought goes on. Despite the change from sun and warmth (yesterday) to cold (today), a drop of 15c here, one of the many weather forecasts predicts no more meaningful rain for the rest of May. And so it is that the river shrinks, becoming ever smaller and smaller, as the lockdown-ed, and fishing-less, weeks go by.
One suspects that angling would be pretty marginal in terms of success anyway, because of the lack of water.
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One of our tenants, the most charming and gentle of men, Graeme Witty, died last week in a tragic accident. Multi-British and World Champion ploughman and hugely respected in his native Yorkshire, he was here in March, amidst all those floods and gales when, to occupy his time, he would go off with his backpack for a 12 miles hike around Coldstream and surrounding district. The photograph is of Graeme playing a fish in the Cauld Stream.
How he loved his fishing, just one of the many highlights being his 30lber on a fly (all he ever fished with) in February two or three years ago, and another the many (over ten) fine big summer salmon he caught in a few days in mid June 2016, the same week as my son Richard’s wedding was held here. His favourite places were in the middle pools, where you can wade, all on your own.
But for this hellish bug, he would have been here last week, then again in June and July, once more in October. His best friend Terry Harper will be here, bug and lockdown permitting, but as Terry would be the first to say, it could never be the same without Graeme.
We will all miss him.
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Reactions to last week’s attempt at a Protocol for behaviour on Tweed’s riverbank post lockdown were most helpful, thank you. Fisheries Management Scotland has come up with an excellent if more generalised (necessarily because it needs to be applicable to all Scottish rivers) draft.
However, with both travel and accommodation restrictions still in place for some time yet, non-local anglers being able to travel and stay here seems a very long way off. As a consequence, how much of the 2020 letting season for Tweed’s salmon beats can be salvaged is very much in the balance. If there is a second spike we could lose the whole letting season, at best maybe a late July start, but only if all goes well in suppressing the bug from here on.
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Wednesday last week dawned beautiful and bright, not a breath of wind, not a cloud in the sky. After unloading the dishwasher, my only useful contribution to the joint effort that is seven people living in lockdown for eight weeks, I took Puppsie and Roxy (aka “the Rocket”) for their early morning walkies.
Gardens never look better than now, in mid/late Spring. The colours are fresh, so stunningly vivid, the subtle translucent light greens of the beech leaves as they emerge, the grass so very very green after last Sunday’s rain, the shrubs beginning to show their early colours, even the roses are beginning to join in (Canarybird is out). God truly was in his heaven and all was exceedingly well with my world.
Along the 200 yards to the beautiful, albeit slowly decaying folly, the Temple, and back by the river for breakfast when our mutts, both P and the R, will have done their morning business. As I emerged by the Temple folly to overlook the vast, very flat, and sparkling pool bearing its name, all was well, a few gulls, two herons on the far bank.
Then suddenly things began to emerge, just like surfacing submarines, one after the other, eight large black shapes, all shaking their beaks from successful fishing trips as they swallowed what they had caught. I clapped, screamed and shouted as they scrambled, like those Spitfire squadrons of old, intent only on getting away, into the air and away, as fast as possible from their impotently grounded and (sadly) unarmed attacker. I gave them a fright, maybe a little indigestion, but nothing worse.
The mood plunged. It had been light since 5 am. Had they been there since then, creating mayhem amongst those hapless passing smolts? Eight cormorants, big birds, had they eaten 20 smolts each, 160 smolts gone, our adult salmon of the future, never to return, all in one sitting, for breakfast?
I fear coronavirus lockdown has had all sorts of unforeseen consequences. We humans are not fishing, we are not there, the killer birds have the playing fields all to themselves. We are absent and they are winning, by default.
Who would have thought it, a fiendish bat bug from the Far East has effectively done for so many of our Tweed smolts? I never saw a single cormorant in May 2019, not one. But then we humans were in the game last year.
The Tweed Foundation’s ongoing smolt tracking work will give us a clue of the true overall extent of the damage.
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Readers of Tweed news https://www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/?p=6689 will have been surprised to see that with the whole river in lockdown, the only people who ever kill our precious few spring fish nowadays, the net at Gardo, started operating again on 5th May.
Their defence for killing such a scarce resource used to go along the lines of “it isn’t illegal and anyway all the rods are fishing, so why shouldn’t we?”, carefully ignoring both that (a) there is no harvestable surplus of spring fish, and that (b) the rods kill no springers, and have not done so for over 10 years now.
So now this one net will be catching and killing, in order to feed the nation, a scarce resource when no one else is even fishing during lockdown. Gardo has scored a few PR own goals in the past.
This, surely, is the best.
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