news/editorial

11 August 2019 News/Editorial

Tweed’s rod catch for last week was 113 salmon and 93 sea trout, making the running totals 2,486 salmon and 1,215 sea trout for the season to 10th August 2019.

We have had a proper flood at last, and may well have an even bigger one by Monday morning once today’s (Sunday’s) rain is done. With an unsettled forecast for most of the rest of August, who knows when it will calm down. August in 2019 is certainly living up to its billing as statistically the wettest month of the year.

It is always very unlucky on those anglers adversely affected by flooding, but in general terms there is nothing worse than persistent drought for salmon fishing, as we all discovered last year.

We have the water, now all we need is the fish.

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Following on from last week’s conclusion that Tweed’s spring and summer salmon fishing to the end of July, based on the recorded catch figures, has become very slightly worse rather than better over the last 6 years, are we right to assume, as most of us have, that Tweed’s autumn run is dead?

Here we are, almost half way through August, and yet, despite having some water, nobody could claim that salmon runs thus far have been anything but rather disappointing for late July and early August, given the almost complete absence of netting.

There can, therefore, be only two conclusions: first, that numbers are going to continue to be disappointing for August and for the remainder of the autumn, or, secondly, that the main big runs of salmon and grilse are still to come.

Obviously, we prefer the latter.

Whatever else, with water aplenty following the storms of this weekend, we are about to find out which of these will prove to be correct.

To me, this year feels just like a late summer/autumn of old, with water appearing in mid-August followed by big runs of salmon and grilse. The stuff of dreams and wishful thinking maybe, but in August 2011 we had caught just 2 salmon here up to and including the 8th. With a big 10ft flood on the 7th/8th, it was just fishable on the 9th. They caught 8. On the 10th with the river still big but clear, 2 rods caught 28. The month finished with 221 salmon, a figure beyond imagination after catching only 2 in the first week.

Of course, history seldom repeats itself neatly as we often hope it will, but one thing is for sure. With water now and much cooler temperatures, and no netting, if the fish do not appear over the next few weeks, it will do nothing to assuage or answer all our current anxieties about sea survival numbers. But if they do appear in some numbers.

Well, how good would that be?

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I am not sure why I read Trout & Salmon magazine any more. As a mainly salmon fisher, there seems to be very little about salmon in most issues, and then I read the letters pages where far too many still bang the drum for hatcheries.

If people like me have said it once, we have said it a thousand times, hatcheries have their place where wild stocks have sunk to critical levels, but for most rivers it is not smolt production that is the problem, but what happens at sea.

The Tweed has no hatchery and has not had any stocking of salmon for decades now, yet if you plot our catches alongside all those other east coast rivers that do annual stocking, to a greater or lesser extent, including the Tyne, you will see a very similar catches profile. It would be impossible to analyse these catches, and show any advantage to those rivers which stock. Indeed, as the consistently highest catching river and the only one that does no stocking whatever amongst the big 4 (Tay, Tweed, Spey and Dee), you would have thought the message about hatcheries would be clear by now.

That it is not, is due to angler/owner/ghillie pressure, often against the advice and wishes of the River Boards and scientists who know it does no good. It is a (very expensive) placebo administered by River Boards to keep their owners/ghillies/anglers quiet, what I call “the reared pheasant syndrome”.

The answer might be to stop reading T&S altogether. Or, at the very least, ignore its letters pages.