news/editorial

15 June 2014 News/Editorial

As the dog days of summer, in salmon fishing terms, arrive and our minds turn to Wimbledon (can he do it again?), to Royal Ascot, to the Open at Hoylake, to a summer of cricket against the batting magicians of Sri Lanka and India, and then to the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles (you will notice I have avoided any mention of a rude interruption into this mouth watering extravaganza of sport in the form of some minor kick-about in Brazil), we were reminded last week that they may be dog days for salmon, but not for that humbler creature, the trout.

Both forms of trout fishing, sea and brown, over the past month have been spectacular on Tweed.

Our long suffering plumber, Mark went trout fishing one afternoon, dry fly, and caught 13 fish, all returned, 7 sea trout between 1lb and 2lbs, one grayling and 5 good brownies. Another trout angler, dry fly fishing for brownies near here, caught 9 sea trout, again all returned.

Trout anglers in middle Tweed and around Kelso have reported extraordinary tales of catching 20 plus keepable (but none actually kept) brown trout in an evening…in short, things have never been rosier on the trout front since the 1980s.

Even my old friend Tom Fort, notable author of books respectively on the A303, Lawns, the British Weather and Eels (amongst many others and in my view all compulsory reading) frustrated as ever by the lack of salmon and inclement water conditions, caught a 4lb brownie here late one evening last week and cannot stop talking about it; yours truly, a veritable duffer in the dry fly stakes, despite the lure of bed when it gets to 9.45pm, has staggered out for an hour before dark and invariably come home with tales of derring-do in the trout fishing department (one of 2lbs plus lost in the weeds still rankles).

My modus operandi, frowned on by the purists, is to fish with a dry fly, big enough so that I can see it (the fun is in watching as it disappear) rather than one the trout necessarily wants to take; you then find a regular riser, one that is in a rhythm of rising every (say) 3 seconds, and you time the swim downstream of your fly to arrive over its head just as it is due to come up again, and surprisingly often, especially as the light fades, they go for it.

I learnt the theory from another old friend at a drinks party, reckoning he knew all the girls there, went along a line of them, kissing them all fondly on both cheeks, as one does, only to find himself, rather like my trout, kissing the next one even when (a) they had never met before and (b) the next one was a man.

So why the sudden improvement in trout fishing?

Last year there were no sea trout at this time of year and we blamed that on the incredibly cold, long spring and consequent low North Sea temperatures and lack of food…so they came in either late or not at all. This year none of the above apply, we have had both a warm winter and spring, and so far (it is early days) the sea trout seem to be arriving in numbers.

The brown trout are more mysterious; for years old dinosaurs like me have been saying the trout fishing is nothing like it used to be in the 1960s to 1980s despite the biologists, from their electrofishing and other sampling methods, saying there are plenty there.

They also point out that the good sized trout being caught this year have not suddenly arrived out of thin air; they are many years old and have been in the river all along even when anglers were saying there were none to catch.

Even if I would argue that salmon rod catches are a pretty good indicator of abundance (or lack of it), the same is clearly not true of brown trout; they are more secretive, they do not jump about like salmon, they can feed quite happily on the bottom on shrimps and larvae so you might not see any rising either.

There are those who want to count everything, to know exactly how many salmon we have, how many trout, to tell us exactly how many salmon are coming our way from their feeding grounds off Greenland and the Faroes.

It would be the ultimate river management tool, so that you can monitor fish populations with absolute knowledge rather than, as we have now, estimates from reported catch data and from often inaccurate/incomplete counts from electronic fish counters on caulds.

The trouble is that complete knowledge on numbers will take away something of the mystery of fishing.

As a river manager, I would want to know precise numbers so that decisions can be soundly based on fact.

As an angler, all I want to know is that there is a chance of catching something, the mystery of not knowing how many are there a crucial part of the excitement and anticipation.

Fortunately, clever as we are, I cannot see how we can ever count anywhere near exactly what populations we have on Tweed.

As long as there are “enough” salmon and trout, however you define that, and to preserve the essential mystery of wild fishing………thank heavens for that.