news/editorial

15 November 2020 News/Editorial

My Uncle William, the author of so many successful West End plays, wrote his own autobiography at an early age. He called it “Half Term Report” and it was published in 1954, when he was 42. He died in 1992, so he got it about right.

Here on 15th November, despite the full term being two weeks away, what follows is clearly end of term business. Nature has decided. There are some fish still around, but those that have not ascended beyond any fishing beats, into the headwaters, are not interested in taking your fly. Why would they, for most have been in the river since July and August? They have other things on their minds.

How to sum up the 2020 season? Extraordinary and surprising are as good as I can do. Extraordinary because we trust that never again will the river be shut down for 2 months because of the hideous Covid-19, or any its, as yet unknown, poisonous friends. Surprising because while we were all being locked up, fish started pouring through Berwick harbour. This continued until mid-August when the tap was turned almost completely off.

Some think the autumn run is either still there or will come back soon. It isn’t and it won’t, or at least not any time soon.. Just 9 of the 235 caught here since 1st September were fresh; that is worse than 1 in every 25, or under 4%. More likely is the continuing strength of earlier running fish, the previous well documented cycles being completed if the fish start coming in even earlier, back into February and March. Who knows? For now we should be grateful that nature has shone a light, a beacon of hope, amidst the gloom. Not only were there large numbers of fish, but they were in magnificent shape. Lack of food may have been an issue of the past, perhaps even too much competition from mackerel and other fishy competitors, but my word were the School of 2020 finding food somewhere? To a fish, they were chunky, fat and, if you hooked and tried to land one in June or July, it was a real struggle.They were fit.

If this is a turning point since the glory days of 2013 and before, and that is a big IF, the RTC and its Tweed Foundation scientists are to be congratulated on resisting the calls for hatcheries. Many other rivers now have them, or stock fry or other juveniles every year, but none have fared as well as the Tweed. This is not crowing, far from triumphalism, for we need much more than the evidence of one good year. Nonetheless, the only time you really need to stick to your basic principles, in the face of often extreme outside pressure, is when things are bad. The RTC did that and good on them. A poem by Kipling springs to mind…”If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you”. They had to keep their heads for 6 bad years.

Which takes some doing.

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So what of the November fishing closure thing which keeps cropping up? Is it really that big an issue given that nature and the fish have effectively closed most of it anyway? The average whole river catch for the last 3 years is 277 salmon (2019 was just 120 salmon caught), and 2020 will be little or no better. I rowed Paul Hume last week and he caught 3, none of which were in any worse shape than those we had been catching in October, so why not close in October as well? What about the Upper Tweed beats who never see any fish before October, you will disenfranchise them? If treading/wading on redds is your concern, what about all those winter grayling fishers who go about their business in December and January, ban that as well? At least those you catch in October and November have only weeks to go before they spawn. What about catching and exhausting those precious few February springers who have to survive without eating for 8 or 9 months before they spawn, after you have dragged them about the river? Ban February fishing as well? What about March? Why stop there?

Of course there are arguments and good reasons both pro and con. The last time this happened in the 1920s to 1960s, our forefathers left well alone.

My advice? We should do likewise.

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A punt, for such it must be in the absence of William Younger’s much more accurate services in 2018 and 2019, is that the Tweed 2020 score will exceed 9,000 salmon, possibly even over 10,000. As February and March were almost completely flooded off, and then April and May Covid-shut, with November a non-event too, this represents about 5 months effective fishing. It would be reasonable to suggest that if April and May had been operational, the scores would have been higher still. Some say that what you would have caught in April and May was in fact caught in June and onwards. Although true to some extent, salmon are most catchable when they first enter the river, so inevitably the catches are lower overall after a 10 week lay off. I suspect that the beats around Kelso missed out most, Sprouston, Hendersyde, the Junction and the Floors beats especially, as they tend to be the best in the spring.

Compare this estimate of 9,000/ 10,000+ to the 5 year average of around 6,900. It is quite a change.

What else is new? We learnt there are productive lower Tweed beats like Watham and Dritness, and West Newbiggin, not obviously on the radar before, but they are now. There were also many more big fish, who knows how accurate the surprisingly regular 30lbs+ estimates were, an inevitable consequence of so many fish being (quite rightly) released?

There was also the all too credible theory that increased fish numbers were a result of trawlers being Covid-tied up in harbour and not catching our salmon. Really? So they had been catching them in 2019 and where were they landing them? What markets did all these 1,000s of salmon appear in that they did not appear in this year? So these trawlers are still hoovering up our autumn fish, but did not do so in 2013 and earlier? As Orri Vigfusson once told me “Trawler theories are just plain wrong; if you owned a multi million £ trawler, the last thing you would go after is salmon; there are not enough of them, you have no idea where they are in that vast ocean and anyone targeting them will go very rapidly bust.” In those days, if they suspected a trawler of salmon fishing, the Icelanders would follow it by satellite and contact the port where it landed to find out what it was offloading.

My old bugbear, the sheer extent of spinning upstream in low water, if anything became worse and more obvious, the more fish there were. The good old Tweed Angling Code on Spinning is routinely ignored, for it has no teeth. We caught 425 salmon here this year, of which just 1 was spinning and that was neither being used upstream nor in low water, for we do not permit it. It is a divisive issue, and will no doubt remain so until those who use it too much stop using it so freely in both low and clear water conditions. Those who know the ex North East Drift Netters, now defunct so that more fish can get into our rivers, simply cannot believe that so many of the Tweed rods indulge in quasi fish mongering tactics, when they have lost their summer livelihoods completely and for good.

Enough said, for now.

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And finally, as we are all to a greater or lesser extent locked down, and likely to be for some time, there is another book you must read, the more to understand the long term peril for our precious fish and the rivers they inhabit.

I have already recommended “Stronghold” by Tucker Malarkey, now you must read “Salmon” by Mark Kurlansky. What both books do is put in context the ever shrinking world our salmon have had to retreat into. All western Europe’s rivers used to be teeming with salmon pre the Industrial Revolution. Now 90% of the Atlantic salmon population on this side of the pond reside in just four countries, Scotland, Ireland, Norway and Iceland. In every case where the rivers have ceased to hold salmon, it has been profit motive and human commercial exploitation that has taken precedence. We humans are wholly to blame.

We here on the Tweed are guardians of a massively precious resource, our job to stop what has happened to so many others, not just abroad, but here in the UK as well. Bar the Tyne, every river in England is now more or less endangered in terms of their numbers of salmon, so too most of the West of Scotland. It defies belief that, after reading these two books, anyone could possibly countenance what is happening with fish farms and Scottish west coast rivers. It is exactly what has been going wrong for centuries past, whole river salmonid ecosystems being sacrificed on the altar of economic progress and profit. And so yet another nail is being put in the coffin of many more rivers as the Atlantic salmon’s strongholds retreat ever further north.

It has to stop. Read these books, please. The message could not be clearer.

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By way of postscript to the above, I see there is another book with a similar theme, albeit re Pacific salmon (but the underlying messages are the same). It has been reviewed by my old friend Tom Fort, as I know to my cost not an easy man to please, who describes it as “An epic..eloquently and tautly written”. I have just ordered it, called “Kings of the Yukon” by Adam Weymouth.

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That’s it for now and for this season. May we all meet again in February 2021. Thank you for putting up with it again this year, albeit in its more intermittent form. Whilst finishing this, my old friend Julian Romney sent me the following link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdXIHsGgIQM&t=57s&mc_cid=494ab36130&mc_eid=96d5a8e8eb

It is utterly charming. If you have 20 minutes to yourself in peace and quiet, do watch it. None of us can aspire to the purity of old Arturo’s approach, but you would expect me to contrast it with the practice of endlessly hurling large pieces of metal upstream and reeling them back towards you!

Take care and, even if it too is Covid-cancelled, have a very Happy Christmas.