news/editorial

12 May Editorial/News

Disease has appeared over the last week or two, always unwelcome and distressing to see especially in Tweed’s comparatively weak spring stock. The unusual element is its timing, coming when water temperatures are rising; instinctive reactions are that this could be a return of UDN of the late 1960s; this seems unlikely in that that broke out in cold water and started to disappear and heal up in any survivors in May when the water got warmer.

Catches have declined as more fish have become infected.

Whatever is causing it may never be discovered and while nothing can be done to stop it, hopefully it will not last long and not cause many mortalities. The fungus you see is the result of whatever is wrong, not the cause. The Tweed Foundation biologists are trying to carry out detailed analyses aimed at finding the virus, infection or whatever it is, but that is not easy requiring live samples of (preferably) fresh infected fish.

Random outbreaks of disease are nothing new, as the following tale demonstrates.

Imagine my surprise at opening the Wark fishing book at March 1938 to find a letter from my father, addressed to Jennifer Lovett, the Wark proprietor who has so kindly made the books available.

His letter is interesting on two counts and reads:

“When UDN started in 1967 I tried to tell Mike Ryan (Col. Mike Ryan, Superintendent of the River Tweed Commissioners, aka “Bomber” Ryan on account of his legendary penchant for blowing up caulds, don’t mention his name in Selkirk!) that I had seen it before in 1938, but he was adamant it was something quite new. I wish I had your figures to show him then!”

“I have vivid memories of 1937 as I caught 96 to my own rod in the school holidays in April that year. If my sister Rachel had not elected to get married in London on the last day of the holidays, I would have got to 100”.

My father was 17 and clearly irked by the ridiculous notion of his sister getting married, and in London of all places, when there were fish to be caught.

So let’s look at 1938.

The comment he refers to in the Wark book at the end of March 1938 says “fish all diseased”. Wark in February caught 90, but with the onset of disease, the fish went off and March yielded just 31.

More evidence comes from The Rev William McCallum who wrote a (somewhat idiosyncratic) summary of “The Tweed in 1938” in the Times and he says “in a river full of fish, drought and disease were against sport in spring”. Then again “On the first day of March, a most unlionlike month this year, the Duchess of Roxburghe caught three, including a fresh run fish of 17lbs, and fagged the fins (whatever that means!) on other days, but disease raged”. Then later, “spots of fungus were on every fish” and later still “in beautiful weather, disease began to wane and fish to recover, and by April 14 at Hendersyde Col. Taylor had 12 to his own rod”

Was it UDN? In many ways it rings bells with the horrors of 1967, but much less devastating. It could be that an unusually warm late March and April saved the day, one well known trait of 1967 being that fish began to recover when the water temperature got above 45F, and there was no disease throughout the summer until temperatures cooled down again in the late autumn.

So was my father or “Bomber” Ryan right; we will never know, but his dismissal of my father’s assertion was clearly unkind, unfair and wrong. Something happened in 1938 and as we still do not fully understand the 1967 outbreak, nobody can ever say whether 1938 was or was not the same thing.

The 1938 disease was short lived; in a week or two it would be nice to say the same of 2013.