news/editorial

13 October 2019 News/Editorial

The Tweed needle is stuck, the same notes are played week after week, and so it goes on; “unsettled” hardly does it justice, as we contemplate more of the same.

Scores of 134 salmon and 22 sea trout for the week past, and 4,946 salmon and 1,776 sea trout cumulatively to date, have certainly not been reduced by drought conditions. Some idiot (yours truly) prayed to the God of rain in the early summer to get His act together; it took Him some time and now He won’t stop. At least He has a sense of humour.

As I write this, the rain today (Sunday) may well rise the river again, and there is more wet stuff scheduled for Wednesday.

None of the catch figures above includes any salmon or sea trout caught above a certain point on each tributary, for a line has to be drawn somewhere, so extensive is the Tweed system. My brother lives near Kirknewton on the Glenn, which runs into the Till just north of Wooler, above the Till line.

He tells me that they (or rather “he”, for there was only one very part time rod) caught 8 grilse there last week, some silver. Which is more than us here, more than the Junction and Tillmouth.

Funny old game.

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My talk last Monday to the Coldstream Social and Literary Society was well attended, not least by two or three of my kind correspondents, who knew worryingly too much about what I was trying to pretend I knew something about!

One told me correctly that, at peak, there were 168 (against my figure of 120) drift netters working off the north east coast of England in the 1960s, habitually declaring an annual catch of over 100,000 salmon/grilse, while another told me (again correctly) that in 1971 the reported net catch off Grenland was a staggering 2,700 tonnes of salmon, equivalent to over 600,000 salmon. Up to another 500,000 salmon would be caught by the multitude of other Irish and UK river and coastal nets every year in the 1960s to 1980s, following the change from hemp to mono/multifilament nets.

Here in 2019, we now have virtually no UK/Irish netting at all anywhere, and only subsistence netting by the Faroese and Greenlanders, around 20 tonnes each pa.

Some say we should not worry about the lack of fish now, quoting the years after UDN in 1967 as an example of when Tweed rod catches were similarly low. Indeed, rod catches were similarly low, but now we have no UDN, we have no poaching (rife in the 1970s and 1980s), and we have no high seas and coastal/river netting removing over 1 million salmon annually from the sea before they could get back up their native UK rivers to be available to the rods, and then to spawn.

It is wholly different, now as compared to the 1960s to 1980s. Then we knew exactly why the rod catches were low, because of truly massive extraction by netting and because of UDN post 1966. Now we have no idea, no easily identifiable reason, why numbers, and catches, are so poor.

I find it very concerning.