news/editorial

16 February 2014 News/Editorial

The wind is howling from the south east, white horses on the water, impossible to throw a fly into that, and the oyster catchers and cormorants are wheeling about, aerial acrobats in the gale.

In 2 weeks time the Tweed Commission will set its assessment rate and budget for 2014. It is a tried and tested formula, one in a previous life I assisted in applying rigidly, as one has to by law.

But it is out of date, a system born of the days when the rods and nets killed everything and the nets paid per fish on a par with the rods, because nobody wanted to rent rod fishing in the 1950s and 1960s, or at least not at any worthwhile price.

The situation now is borderline mad.

Consider the figures (all of which are theoretical, if having some vague semblance of truth, and anyway most of the true ones are available from the RTC’s published annual report).

Let us assume that the Tweed rods catch 15,000 salmon/year and kill a third (5,000), and that the nets catch and kill 2,500, all based on 5 year averages.

Let us now assume that the Tweed Commission needs to raise £605,000/year to run the river, and that it raises it £600,000 from the rods and £5,000 from the nets. This is a product of a system too complicated to explain, based on economic annual value alone.

Let us also assume that not all the nets have agreed to stop netting until 15th June, so that some of them continue to kill our precious few springers, which they sell at premium spring prices and all they pay for each one is £2 (£5,000/2500).

At the same time the rods kill no springers at all and they pay £40 for each one caught and returned.

Not only that but the £5,000 paid by the nets in assessment is more than paid back to those nets who have agreed not to start netting until 15th June (by law they can start on 15th February).

In summary, the end result is that (1) the rods fund the whole of the Tweed Commission (because the £5,000 paid by the nets as a whole is more that outweighed by compensation paid for starting late), (2) the rods kill no springers, but some of the nets have always killed them and continue to do so, and (3) the rods kill just twice as many salmon as the nets but effectively pay £120 (£600,000/ 5,000 fish killed) each, whereas the nets pay just £2 for each fish killed.

Even stranger, at £2/fish if the nets had to fund the whole of the Tweed Commission, they would need to catch and kill over 300,000 salmon, which would just about wipe out the entire Tweed salmon population.

When the system was devised there was no concept of conservation and research, “catch and release” and the Tweed Foundation both in a far off and strange land.

I have no doubt that any new system will need to take account of the economics as a base, as it does now, but, crucially, not to the exclusion of all else, and with conservation an added vital ingredient.

At present the nets provide virtually no funds at all (after compensation payments) to both the RTC and the Tweed Foundation, yet they can kill many thousands of fish every year, and some of them continue to kill springers. I need hardly mention the age old chesnut about whether or not all the nets declare their true catch! Hopefully mandatory numbered carcass tagging will go some way to sorting that one out.

In conclusion, all of this has to be wrong, and it must change sooner or later.

Now, back to that wind; it is still howling from the south east, but the white horses are not on the Tweed (as you may have thought) but on the Indian Ocean, the oyster catchers are bigger but less attractive than ours, and the cormorants are, well…..just like any other cormorants.

I am in Arniston a seaside town 2 hours drive east of Cape Town, and the view is just indescribably stunning as I look out onto the turquoise but very rough, almost tumultuous ocean.

It must have been a scene such as this, but from a stricken ship 900 yards offshore, which horrified the passengers and crew of the English East Indiaman, Arniston, on 30th May 1815, almost 200 years ago. Held by an anchor, but hopelessly disabled, the Captain ordered the anchor to be pulled up hoping that the ship would blow ashore so that those on board could reach shore and survive.

It was not to be. The ship foundered on the reefs and broke apart, and just 6 of the 378 on board survived.

Amongst the dead were 4 brothers aged 7 to 13, the children of Lt Col. Andrew Geils of HM 73rd regiment, and there is a most moving little monument, also within my view as I survey the scene, erected ” by their disconsolate parents”.

Life is full of the most terrible tragedies, but I defy any of you battle hardened, “seen it all” types to read that memorial as we did, such tragedy amid such incredible beauty, without it bringing a tear, even 200 years later, to the eye.

Those poor boys, separated from their parents, no life jackets, they would never have learnt to swim, they must have been terrified…..and all well within sight of where I am sitting now, safely on dry land.

They are buried, we are told, in the equally beautiful, pure white, sun drenched sand dunes, also within my panoramic view, above the golden beaches on which their bodies were washed ashore.