15 September 2019 News/Editorial
In an up and down sort of week (the river rose less than a foot at least three times before dropping in again), the scores were steady, but a long way from being good. The conclusion has to be that there are a few fish everywhere, but no great numbers, and very few fresh ones anywhere. Which is all very reminiscent of the last 5 years.
The Tweed catches for last week were 290 salmon and 29 sea trout, making the accumulated scores to 14th September 4,155 salmon and 1,660 sea trout, within 90% accuracy.
As for next week, it seems that a brief Indian Summer is upon us, and that high pressure will dominate next week, so expect benign, calm days and cool nights. The river heights could shrink to near summer levels. Those who like to reach for their spinning rods, flying condoms and cast them upstream in the lowest of water conditions, will not be able to do so.
It is “fly only” from now on, by law.
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We have been getting some stick, on good old social media and elsewhere, here at The Lees this year, because some of our tenants actually caught some salmon and sea trout by spinning.
Our rules are very clear, no upstream spinning is allowed at any time, and spinning downstream is only permitted at 1ft 10” and above on our gauge ie when the river is big. Even when over 1ft 10”, we encourage fly fishing first, with the only possible exception being when the river is very big and dirty, and a gale is blowing.
So here are our figures for 2019, to 15th September.
Total salmon caught 211, of which 21 have been spinning. Of those 21, 14 were caught between 14-21 August when the river was big and dirty (between 2ft and 3ft on our gauge). During that same time, another 20 salmon were caught on a fly. Even in big water, we try to fish first with a fly. Only on the 19th August, when there was a gale blowing and the river was over 2ft 6”, and dirty, did a fly rod not get much of an airing.
We publish all our “spinning” catch figures for earlier years on the right hand side of the Lees main page on this site here https://www.tweedbeats.com/beats.php?name=the_lees.
Will those who were so keen on getting at us on social media, publish their own spinning catch figures for this and previous years?
Ah, I thought not.
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In many ways those fishing this week will be operating in a defining period for the autumn. The river will be settled, nights and therefore water temperatures will be cool until later in the week, so conditions for catching fish should be fairly good, to start with at least.
Most would say there are not that many fish in the river, despite the catch by now well exceeding 4,000 for the year, and that most of those that are there are old river fish. These will become increasingly hard to catch, so continued angling success, logically, will depend on fresh fish running in from the sea.
There have been a few silvery ones over the last week or so, mainly grilse but also some bigger fish, but the bulk of catches has been of the older variety.
Will that change? It needs to.
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