news/editorial

10 September 2017 News/Editorial

More thanks to the heroic efforts of William Younger in providing the following figures, which he now believes are 90% accurate ie they could understate real catches by no more than 10%.

This improved accuracy comes from 7 formerly non-reporting beats now reporting anonymously and confidentially (to him alone). He has also updated the sea trout catch for the correct figures to 30th June, as kindly supplied by the RTC.

Total catch for last week ending 9th September 2017 141 salmon and 25 sea trout

Cumulative total catch to 9th September 2017 3,817 salmon and 1,433 sea trout

The weekly catches at present are symptomatic of a river with old fish where beats catch 2 or 3, at best, a day. Hopefully, the extra water last week, with a forecast unsettled start to the coming week, will produce more in both quantity and quality.

Many will forgive me, some will not, if I salute the end of spinning next week on 14th September. Those hideous rapalas, flying condoms and spoons have had their day for another year.

Thank God, or more accurately the provisions of the Tweed Order under the Scotland Act, for that.

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Perhaps it is best never to analyse why we go fishing, for it would involve the uncomfortable admission, based on results, that either we are not very good at it, or that the fish, our salmon, are often not there and, even when they are there in some numbers, they do not want to be caught.

Some say it is called “fishing” because it is so extraordinarily unsuccessful, whereas it would be called “catching” if it more often included actually hooking and landing something.

You find me in the permanent sunshine of Portugal, time for reflection, and I have been reading Howard Spring’s remarkable epic novel “The Houses In Between”.

In it Haggie Chadderton, our now very aged heroine’s companion, says “I tell you, Mrs Undridge, there’s a lot to be said for enjoying life by not doing things. It can be very comforting. So much better than inventing all sorts of duties and works that mean nothing and make the day all a scuffle and chatter”.

Written in 1949, how much truer are those sentiments today; everybody it seems is connected, busy at something, be it working far too long hours or hermetically sealed to their i-phones, i-pads or whatever else.

There is far too much “scuffle and chatter”.

The answer to the question “why?” will of course be slightly different for all of us, but maybe not so very different.

I remember my father, latterly, would take his “bus” (“car” to you and me), his rod and labrador Tully down to the river (the Glenn) on summer evenings, but seldom bothered to fish, content to be by the river, maybe a cast or two in a likely spot…...but mostly he just wanted to be there…...as Haggie said “enjoying life by not doing things”.

I am becoming like him; most summer evenings I go down to the river, sometimes walking, more often in my “bus”, sometimes with the unreliable Puppsie, more often not, and I will be gone for anything up to two hours…….but increasingly little of that time is spent actually fishing, and when I do fish, I tend to chose the most unlikely spots, preferably where hardly anybody fishes, because it is normally no good there.

I catch remarkably little, not yet at the point where I do not want to catch one, but in the not too distant future I would not be surprised if that comes too. I just like being there, preferably when nobody else is about but the dippers, kingfishers, sand martins, otters (I saw two fighting one evening this year, spray, snarling, fur flying everywhere), the odd fish jumping (hopefully in those places where nobody except me ever fishes), a late fishing osprey…...there is always something new and interesting if you just give it time and sit on the river bank, observing.

What I am trying to say is that, as I get older, actually catching something has become a less and less important part of the business of fishing; whereas when I was young, catching something was not very far from the whole point…..and nothing but the point…..it really isn’t now.

But crucially, even when I go out and hardly fish, there has to be the hope of catching one, however remote, or I would not go out at all. We are all like this, for if there are no fish at all, I do not know of any salmon fisherman, even the most fanatical, who would bother to go out.

Does salmon fishing qualify as Haggie’s “doing nothing”?

I think it does, for it is all absorbing, in removing, for a few hours at least, the troubles and worries in ordinary life, which we all have.

“What life is this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare

No time to stand beneath the boughs, and stare as long as sheep or cows

No time to see when woods we pass, where squirrels hide their nuts in grass

No time to see in broad daylight, streams full of stars like skies at night”

Doing nothing, standing and staring…….while fishing in those “streams full of stars”.

As Haggie said, it can be very comforting.