news/editorial

13 May 2018 News/Editorial

As another week of disappointing catches slides by, with a total of 51 salmon and 4 sea trout, making cumulative figures of 464 salmon and 44 sea trout for the year to 12th May 2018, when, you might ask, will things improve?

If, like me, you have been enjoying Jeremy Clarkson’s typically laddish appearances as the host in the (too briefly) revived “Who wants to be a Millionaire?”, you will know that the contestants now have four lifelines (previously three) for any question they cannot answer.

The new one is “Ask the host”.

If you were to ask Jeremy when will salmon fishing improve, he would no doubt respond something like this:

“What an idiotic question, how can I possibly answer that…...and anyway salmon fishing is a pointless, stupid sport in which only the terminally optimistic engage”.

Well, quite.

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Some years ago, my elder brother Simon and wife Sally got together a party, this time of year, maybe early June, to go to the Farne Islands to see all the wonderful nesting birds.

Their party (some ten of us) was made up of pretty regular types, and we were joined on the boat by a number of others, delightful folk all, but clearly beguiled by the ghastly Packhamesque drivel about how seals are unreservedly good, cuddly things, and the more we have of them the better.

All of which, for we who dislike Packham, and his disdain for the underdog (ie the hedgehogs eaten by badgers, the green plover eaten by ravens, the red squirrels eaten by buzzards, the small fish eaten by sawbills….I could go on), was not quite what the ten good men/women and true in my brother’s party were thinking as the boat’s skipper laid offshore to observe far too many fat seals lazing about on rocks, fat no doubt because of their liking for prime Tweed salmon.

In the course of his commentary, said skipper ventured the information that nothing predates on seals other than Orcas, those highly intelligent killer whales, at which point aforesaid ten good men/women and true perked up…..until he deflated our incipient bubble by saying…. “and the last time an Orca was seen here was 30 years ago”.

Oh, not so good, we all thought, in stark contrast to our more townie friends, those unwittingly indoctrinated by Packham, who, to a man/woman, visibly sighed with relief.

While we regular folk discussed, sotto voce, if there was an Orca agency we could dial up, and hire a few of their clients to holiday off the Farnes for a week or two, (seal) dinner, B&B included in the price?

And then suddenly last week my generous correspondent, whilst bemoaning the cock-up on the NEDNF closure (now formally confirmed not to be happening for reasons that were distinctly less than convincing), advised that a pod of Orcas were even then holidaying off the Farnes.

A quick Google visit via Mail online revealed a video, taken by crab fishermen off the Northumbrian coast, of a pod of 12 Orcas, together with some barely audible commentary from the fishermen, to a man not exactly natural friends of the seal, but the gist of which, amongst a few edited bleeps, was that the Orcas would be doing a good job if they dined on some salmon enriched Farne seals for a week or two.

More recent history does not relate whether those nice killer whaley things are still there, but you would think, with a superabundance of lunch on tap .…

...they would at least consider it.