14 April 2019 News/Editorial
Last week’s Tweed rod catch was 90 salmon and 9 sea trout, making the total to date 376 salmon and 42 sea trout, within 90% accuracy.
The best week of the season so far, a result of both perfect water conditions and a few more fresh fish coming in, started with catches well spread out and ended, as levels dropped, with signs of salmon holding up below Coldstream.
Next week this could be a continuing trend of success for the lowest beats as the weather forecasters predict no rain, those bitter easterlies turning south and west from Wednesday, and temperatures recovering into the high teens, even low twenties, by Easter Sunday.
Quite apart from the joy’s of discarding winter clothing, for those of us who prefer to fish with a fly, and with low, clear and warming waters, we can look forward to using lighter, floating lines and sizes 8 or 10 flies.
Summer, or something like it, could be just around the corner.
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Talk of salmon numbers decline can become depressing, but that it is a frightening reality is demonstrated by the graph and figures in the following link http://www.nasco.int/wgc_measures.html
At a time, 30 to 50 years ago, when our rivers were full of fish for the rods, our own Tweed nets were prospering and the North East drift nets were cleaning up, the Faroese were catching 100s of tonnes of salmon on their longlines, and every year between the early 1960s and the mid 1980s the West Greenland fishery was catching between 1,000 and 2,500 tonnes of salmon, a truly staggering number.
They now catch just 30 tonnes, the Faroese have effectively ceased all commercial fishing, there is almost no Tweed netting and the North East drift nets have gone, and yet still our rivers are not full of fish.
The sheer scale of the decline over the last 30 years is astonishing.
You can blame seals, cormorants and goosanders all you like, and of course they do not help, but the massive extent of the decline clearly points to a much much more fundamental cause.
In the sea.
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Maybe it is old age, but several evenings of late I have decided to go fishing, stepped outside to be greeted by that piercing east wind, and decided not to bother.
Instead, I can be seen pacing the grass outside my house with a 7 iron, sheltered from the easterly blast, trying to work out why Rory McIlroy can hit it for miles out of the middle every time, whereas I am lucky if one in five is hit in the sweet spot.
Talent, or lack of it, might have something to do with it. Some people have it, whereas most of us do not.
Many years ago, I rowed Allan Lamb in our Temple Pool. For those of my readers who are ignorant of the ways of the willow and of Lord’s Cricket Ground, “Lamby” is the only man to have scored three test centuries in a series against the insuperable West Indians when the mighty quartet of Holding, Garner, Roberts and Marshall took it in turns to project that red ball at the luckless opposing batsmen at over 90 mph.
He caught seven beautiful salmon in the Temple Pool, having hardly fished, and displayed annoyingly easy competence with a 15ft salmon rod for someone who had never even seen one, let alone used one before.
After landing yet another silver beauty, he turned to his oarsman, yours truly, and in his unmistakable South African lilt uttered the immortal words “Christ, Andrew, this is better than a ton at Lord’s!”
To which I could only reply “ I wouldn’t know”.
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