news/editorial

14 July 2019 News/Editorial

Tweed’s catch for last week was a desultory 72 salmon and 42 sea trout, making totals for the year to date of 1,880 salmon and 770 sea trout. Interestingly, all bar one of the fish caught on Friday and Saturday were at Coldstream or below, despite minimal water levels indicating a push of fresh fish, including small grilse, off the tides.

The missing ingredient, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, is water, and although next week, yet again, is scheduled to be unsettled from mid-week, will it produce enough rain? So far the answer has consistently been “no” despite similarly unsettled forecasts. Our luck must change sometime, but preferably not to the extent of Storm Barry in New Orleans with a predicted 2 feet of rain over the next 24/48 hours.

2 inches of rain at Eskdalemuir would do it for us.

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Last Monday lunchtime, after our rods had had a successful morning, all in high good humour, they looked outside the hut to see great rafts of weed coming down. Somebody upstream of us had decided that late Monday morning, with anglers fishing on every beat below them, was a good time to cut their weed. They effectively denied our fishers any action that afternoon, and still made fishing difficult long into the evening. I know, I tried and caught weed every third cast.

I will not name the beat, but quite how they could do such a thing and spoil so many anglers’ fun, on a Monday of all days, is quite beyond most of us who experienced it? Anglers had paid good money to fish, and the actions of a few, meant they could not. The beat concerned is lucky if it does not face demands for compensation from all the anglers downstream who were affected. If there is anything good to come out of this, it is that the subject of weed cutting on the Tweed in summer needs to be sorted out, once and for all.

If my memory serves, it used to be the case that, in the 1980s-2000s, the River Tweed Commission recommended weed cutting only in the last 2 weeks of July, but, crucially, that was before the summer became a desirable time to fish for both salmon and sea trout, as it has since the high seas netting reductions of the early 2000s. Most beats in those years hardly let their summer fishing at all, whereas today almost every beat is let, or available to let. As a result cutting weed in July, during the week, when people are trying to fish, is now just plain bonkers.

UNLESS.

The only exception is that you do it on a Sunday, or very late on a Saturday evening, so that fishermen are unaffected, all the cut weed having run through or settled by Monday morning. As for us, well we never do it at all, other than in a very few places and then we make sure we do it at times which leave anglers completely unaffected. Consideration for others should be uppermost in any weed cutter’s mind.

It most certainly was not on Monday last week.

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The advances in the efficiency of food production are of interest to us all, especially when those “advances” include farmed salmon.

The following links were sent to me by my kind correspondent about a newly approved, in the USA, genetically modified salmon that grows twice as fast as normal salmon. The concern must be that these GM salmon will soon find their way into our Scottish farms, with we know not what consequences, when 1,000s of them escape. They are aggressive feeders and will presumably out-compete our wild fish when it comes to feeding, both in the sea and if/when they get into our rivers eg adversely affect our precious smolts?

Any such concerns, and myriad others about the damaging consequences of farmed fish on wild salmon, both now and in the future, will be of much less concern if all fish farms were required to be in close containment, on land, where they cannot damage the marine environment. Here are the links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AquAdvantage_salmon

https://aquabounty.com/aquadvantage-the-first-gmo-salmon-is-coming-to-america/

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Loyal readers will remember our Lancashire Heeler, Puppsie, a sure guide as to when you should be switching from a sinker/intermediate to a floater. She comes inside when it is cold, and is outside in the garden almost all day when it is not.

She is feeling sorry for herself, having contracted kennel cough from Malcolm’s ginger dug, Jock. Every time she coughs, a horrible hacking sound coming from deep within her lungs, she comes to me looking fussed, ears back and tail between her legs. She probably thinks she is about to die, and no matter how much I say she will be fine, she does not understand.

Unlike you and me, when we contract some dreadful lurgy, we go off to the health centre/clinic/hospital and some nice doctor gives us a pill and says, “Don’t worry, it will clear up within a week, you will be fine” and we go away quite certain that the end is not nigh, tail up, ears forward. Puppsie cannot do that, no matter how much I try to make her understand. Maybe if I purchased an Alexa thing, I could instruct her to communicate with Puppsie ? Worth a try.

Poor Puppsie.