news/editorial

15 August 2021 News/Editorial

Sunday evening regulars will, I hope, forgive this early posting for we are by way of going to Sir Walter Scott’s 250th birthday anniversary bash at Abbotsford, a jamboree of epic proportions to celebrate an extraordinary man. We hope to see old friends from the days when we thought Abbotsford might not be saved, but under Russell Sanderson’s guidance and the selfless contributions of so many others, it was, and is now in the safe hands of Chairman James Holloway and Chief Exec Giles Ingram. Not given to too many flights of fancy, I will be there with the permanent thought of my old friends, sisters Patricia and Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott, the last family inhabitants of the house, looking down in wonder, and outright approval and joy, that their ancestors' home is now in such rude good health. A tear might almost come to the eye.

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There is a tyranny about this weekly Sunday evening thing, self inflicted of course, but nonetheless it is not easy always having something interesting (?) to say on just one subject. With exception of the normal weekly update (below), I was struggling for anything else, until Fate took a hand yesterday morning.

With some fish about, I ventured out for a cast. To my surprise and delight, I soon hooked one and after a short interval, for it clearly was not big, I had it up against the steep bank in the only place I could access it. Then I noticed there was no sign of the fly (a no. 8 Cascade) and there was blood seeping from the 5lb fresh cock grilse’s gills. Not good, for if there is one thing about fishing nowadays that upsets me, it is that every now and then you deep hook one so badly that it cannot be saved. I then noticed one hook protruding from the gill cover; extraordinarily it had swallowed the hook so far down that a hook was visible, from the outside, coming through the back of its gills. As a last desperate throw, I thought, stupidly as it transpired, that if I could pull the whole fly through the back of its gills, I could snip the fly off and see if the fish had any chance by holding it in the water and judging from the flow of blood if it could survive. For those who think I should have cut the nylon and left the fly in, I reckoned that with the fly so far into its gills, its chances of making it to the spawning beds, with the fly lodged there and the amount of blood it was losing, were not far from zero.

Requiring a delicate touch, I tried to get the hook out with my fingers, assessing that forceps could not do the job sufficiently precisely. And that is when it all went horribly wrong.

As I grasped the single exposed hook in my fingers, the fish lurched and in so doing, the hook went straight into and through my middle finger. Then the fish continued to lurch and struggle, causing intense pain to my finger as all 5lbs of it was effectively hanging from the hook now embedded in that finger. With only one usable hand (the other one with a 5lb grilse hanging from it by a single hook!), I either had to untie the fly or somehow get it out of my finger. But where the fly was joined to the nylon was nowhere to be seen, the shank being invisible within the gill cover, even if the hook was not. There was only one thing for it.Grasping my forceps, with scissors inbuilt, I decided I had to cut the hook from my finger, which is exactly what I did. To say I have never known such pain may be something of an exaggeration, but not far from it.

The poor fish by now was all but dead, blood everywhere, not quite Psycho but nearly, and I could not work out how much of it was mine and how much his. I made sure he would suffer no more with a quick tap on the head with a nearby stone, laid it on a small shelf to my side, and then sat down. Which is when I realised that all was not well. The blood had gone from my head, I was feeling sick and faint, shock no doubt at carrying out a minor surgical procedure on myself without any anaesthetic. I lay down as best I could given the restricted space, and rang Jane in case, hidden away under the bank where nobody could see me, I passed out and could not be found. During our conversation I slowly began to feel better and realise that normal service might soon be resumed.

I struggled up the steep bank with my unwelcome prize, the poor fish for whose demise I was responsible, and drove home, still feeling not great. Jane greeted me with all sorts of disinfectants and plasters, bound tight, so that the operated-on skin might heal itself and avoid infection. My colourful (red) handkerchief bandage, which had stemmed the initial flow, was consigned to the non-recyclable rubbish, but I am so glad I had it.

So there we have it, all is well and I have survived one night’s sleep without waking up screaming at the thought of taking sharp scissors and cutting well into my own finger. Is there a lesson ? Sadly, I suspect I should just have accepted that that fish was unsaveable, no matter what I did.

Would I learn and next time not try to save it? Probably not.

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Well, we have fish and we had some water, not much but enough for a few good days fishing.

Some 400 salmon may have been caught last week, by a street the best week of the year so far, and surprisingly well spread out from Horncliffe to St Boswells, albeit with an easterly bias.

That the extra water was nowhere near enough, long term, is a worry, when every forecast you look at, inc “Windy Wilson”, sees no sign of any more significant rain next week, as the wind and weather become northwesterly, dry/showery and cool. It could be worse, as a return of the July heat would kill it completely. No point in complaining, we will get what we get, and cool and dry is a whole lot better than the 40c+ that our European neighbours are having to endure.

From the annual score point of view, and if we assume that November will be not much of a contributor, then we will have to replicate last week’s 400+ every week between now and the end of October to get to 6,000 for the year.

Some say that what is happening here is all part of the natural cycle of things, although after the comparative failure of the June and July runs this year, it is a little unclear exactly what that new cycle will turn out to be. There are also signs of many more grilse this year, whereas the future was supposed to be salmon, not grilse. Transitions are by their nature bumpy, not smooth, and if we are heading for a future of more salmon, running earlier in the year, and fewer grilse, then 2021 looks like being one of those bumps.

The real worry, of course, remains that regardless of any natural cycles, the numbers of salmon and grilse returning to our shores are but a fraction of the numbers both when I was a lad and for many years, centuries even, before that. “Shifting baselines” is a modern phenomenon where we all compare to the recent past, not to what was possible before we humans trashed the place.

Two, of the many, striking examples of our current decline are these:

“In the course of last year (1787) 10,215 boxes of fresh salmon were shipped at Berwick, each containing 6 stone….during the same period not less than 300,000 salmon, grilse and sea trout were taken in the river Tweed.”

“In 1873 there were 129,100 salmon caught in the Tyne; successful catches of the 21st century are between 2,000- 4,000 salmon.”

In other words, we have become accustomed to mediocrity. Even if those figures included mainly net caught salmon, it is frankly ludicrous to suppose that Tweed’s salmon numbers today would support, from the Harbour in Berwick to Norham, some 7 miles upstream, 70 boats in each of which were 6 men, catching sometimes 400-500 fish in a single draught, as in 1787.

Now we have one part time net at Gardo catching 400-500 fish in a whole year.

That is the measure of our decline. Remember that phrase. Shifting baselines.

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Long in the tooth anglers like yours truly have a jaundiced view of grilse. I hear the rods at Lower North Wark landed 1 out of 14 one day last week, and we did much better on Saturday with 6 out of 17! Like children everywhere, they are flighty, carefree and unreliable.

When you get the slow solid pull of a big salmon, more often than not you will land it. But with grilse, the odds are often against. They are, nonetheless, a lot better than nothing.