news/editorial

16 February 2020 News/Editorial

Seldom are there weeks when not a cast is made, not a fly flicked, nor a spinner spun. Last week was one, and this week could be another. Messrs Ciara and then Dennis (completely unforecast just a week ago) have seen to that.

So the February score remains “around about” 15 salmon for the season. Februaries are never prolific nowadays, 150 being a par score, but with no sign of settled weather conditions this side of March, opportunities to fish, let alone catch something, over the next two weeks, could be rare. At times like this, you wonder if it will ever stop raining.

Of more concern, for the long term for fishery owners, is the narrowing of the Tweed’s season, which this flooded February will do nothing to help. One assumes it will all calm down in March, when the fishing battle will re-commence, but with a fishless November and a washed-out February, good news is in short supply.

Today’s (Sunday’s) flood is even bigger than last week’s, and heaven only knows what the two together will have done to the spawning beds. It is now not unlike 2015/16, with multiple massive floods in quick succession, and the cumulative effects will only be known when fry sampling is done in the summer/ early autumn; whatever else, they can have done no good whatever. After 3 years (2016/17, 2017/18 and 2018/19) of remarkably benign winters (I am not forgetting the brief Arctic invasion that was “the beast from the east”) with none of these multiple damaging floods and excellent spawning conditions, sadly 2019/20 is payback time.

Bad news for salmon anglers just keeps on coming, it seems. But, who knows, something better could be just around the corner?

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The proliferation of mindless spoutings in the Press about the benefits of beavers, and how they help to alleviate flooding, continue apace.

It is, of course, all rot. Logically, the only benefit of their dams re flooding, is if they hold back water in the really big, property damaging floods, because all more normal smaller “floods”/spates/rises in water, are pretty harmless anyway.

The idea that any beaver dam could withstand the aftermaths of Ciara and Dennis, and the resulting 13ft/14ft Tweed floods, is frankly absurd. I stood beside the silent but menacing sheer power of the Tweed in all its magnificence, both today and last Sunday, and considered the effect of the foaming irresistible torrent on any beaver dams upstream. I laughed out loud, so ludicrous was the thought of those cute furry animals having any beneficial impact whatever in stopping that pounding tsunami of fresh water. Their dams would not only collapse, possibly producing an additional flash flood when they do so, but also add countless trees and rubbish to the pile of debris we have to clear up down here anyhow.

So next time someone spouts the beavers “alleviating flooding” mantra to you, resist it, scoff at it and tell your interlocutor, in the nicest possible way, that he or she is talking, well tommy rot.