news/editorial

11 November 2018 News/Editorial

The Tweed’s rod catches for last week were 69 salmon and 13 sea trout, making totals of 5,225 salmon (after a recount) and 691 sea trout for the season to 10th November 2018, all within 90% accuracy.

As expected, there was little sign of an influx of silver salmon last week. In addition, Monday was clearing from a flood, and Friday and Saturday plagued with rising/flooding water.

As for next week, it looks to be slightly more settled weatherwise, if unseasonably mild.

The weather, and water levels, are not, alas, the real problem.

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Rumbling just beneath the surface on Tweedside, in fishing huts, in pubs and hotels and anywhere else that fishermen gather, is an increasingly bitter battle between two opposing sides.

Team 1, let us call them “The Aggressors”, is comprised of a number of Tweed’s regular fishermen, allied to a number of Tweed’s boatmen, but also no doubt including some letting agents, hoteliers, tackle shop owners etc. Typically, they blame the River Tweed Commission’s management, together with the predations of seals and birds, for the reduced numbers of salmon. Crucially, what really binds them as a team is an abiding and unshakeable belief in stocking and hatcheries as the definitive way to increase adult salmon numbers, to the extent of those with the necessary funds almost offering to pay for the hatchery facility themselves. If they believe at all in the principal cause of mortality being adverse conditions for our smolts in the sea, they are not prepared to wait for these to change, but believe they can engineer more adult returners by putting more juveniles (fry, parr or smolts) from a hatchery into the river. They believe the RTC is sitting on its hands/fiddling while Rome burns...and accuse all aspects of the Tweed “establishment” of complacency in not agreeing to a hatchery, in not killing all fish-eating birds, in not killing all seals....and a number of other things. Typically, they display extreme anger at the current situation and are convinced they would run the river better than the RTC and Tweed Foundation, and that by their interventionist policies they would achieve turnaround in salmon numbers very quickly.

Team 2, let us call them “The Defenders” is comprised of the management and scientists of the RTC and Tweed Foundation, the majority of the 81 members of the RTC itself (especially those proprietors who actually own the fishing), allied to many of the other Tweed (non hatchery believing) boatmen and regular fishermen on the Tweed. What unites them is a fundamental understanding that Tweed’s salmon is a wild resource subject to the variations, the ups and downs, of the natural, especially marine, environment. Typically, they believe in “letting the salmon do it for themselves”, in providing them with as good conditions as possible, within the river, so that there is as big a spawning escapement as possible (no netting, over 90% catch and release, no obstacles in the tributaries so that all salmon can get where they want to go to spawn, improved habitat in the spawning areas to support maximum juvenile numbers…. and so on). Crucially, these “defenders” are implacably opposed to stocking and hatcheries; they understand that the river is producing/has always produced a massive number of smolts, and that reduced returning adults are overwhelmingly a product of natural variations in the North Atlantic. They are prepared to wait, because there is no other sensible choice, until the natural cycle in the oceans changes in favour of increased numbers of our smolts surviving to return home; they believe that adding comparatively unfit hatchery bred fry, parr or smolts to a river already oversupplied with such juveniles will at best produce no additional return of adults, and at worst will lead to additional juvenile mortality, in excess of the numbers stocked, because there is finite space and food within the river to support more young fish. Although these ”Defenders” dislike all fish-eating birds and seals as much as anyone, they believe them to be a problem, but not the problem, which lies in the sea. While striving to increase cull licence numbers, they will never advocate breaking the law when it comes to unlicenced shooting of avian and mammalian predators.

So which of these teams will prevail?

Whereas other rivers have tended to give in, from time to time, to their pro hatchery (“Aggressor”) lobbies, there is little sign of that happening here, despite a fairly unpleasant, febrile atmosphere lurking beneath the surface.

The least attractive element of this is when some of those pro hatchery Tweed boatmen/ghillies display their evident frustration by slagging off the RTC to their customers, both in the boat and in the fishing hut, whilst at the same time promoting the panacea of stocking and hatcheries to those who are hardly in a position to argue.

Nothing could be better designed to put off visiting fishermen from returning.

It is like a restaurant waiter saying to his customers “ The management here is rubbish and the chef has no idea what he is doing, and the food is filthy”....not exactly designed to encourage fishermen to come back, with consequent damage to the prospects of that boatman’s own job, and the jobs of others.

Time will tell how this battle plays out.

To be fair to both sides, they both want the same thing, what Orri Vigfusson used to call “an abundance of fiske”.

They just have radically different views of how to go about achieving it.

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And for those who do want to learn, and to understand the pros and cons of hatcheries, in stark contrast to those who do not, here is the link to the Tweed Foundation’s paper on stocking and hatcheries:

https://www.tweedfoundation.org.uk/FAQ_Tweed_-_Hatcheries_2016.pdf

It cross refers to papers produced by other rivers (the Spey and the Dee for example), in addition to the EA Kielder hatchery/Tyne report to which these pages have often referred in the past.

Here are what some consider to be the key words from the EA Kielder hatchery/Tyne report:

“Current post 1985 annual contribution of direct hatchery returns to Tyne run size and catch is estimated to be mainly between 2% and 7%”. “This is roughly equivalent to the lost production due to the (Kielder) dam”.

In other words, if the dam were not there, natural production from the dammed area would produce the same as the hatchery.

Nothing could be clearer…..93% to 98% of the Tyne catch and run size does not come from the hatchery.

The only effect of the hatchery is to replace production of juveniles lost because of the Kielder dam.

The Tweed has reservoirs Megget, Talla and Fruid which have only minor impacts on Tweed’s total spawning area, minor because they are so high up and have cut off comparatively littlein terms of water accessible to salmon.

Tweed, therefore, has no Kielder equivalent.