17 July 2022 News/Editorial
The Tweed is a sad sight. Extreme heat, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, could result in fish dying, even if it will be short lived and, just possibly, then followed by thunderstorms. How the river needs them, and plenty of them to clean it out.
Predictions for fishing here, until it rains and cools, are similarly poor, unless you fish right down by the tide. If we define a flood as any rise in water of over 2-3ft, then we have had nothing since mid March, a long 4 months ago. With a now acknowledged, and recent, serious pollution (sewage) incident around Melrose, coming at a time of very low waters, the river environment is in poor shape. Freshet releases from reservoirs can provide temporary relief, but are necessarily brief and intermittent. I would be the last person to blame farmers for anything, after all they have to make a living and have an increasingly important job to feed us all, but you do wonder what damaging effects water abstractions, for potatoes especially, have on river water levels in extreme conditions such as these. Are such abstractions (that dreadful word that everyone uses nowadays) “sustainable” long term? Probably not, and there has to be another way of allowing farmers to irrigate in summer eg impoundments of water, gathered over the winter and stored in ponds when water is plentiful?
A debate, for another time maybe, as to whether anyone should be fishing when the river is “bare bones” low and the water temperature above a certain figure; a subject too hot (!) to handle for now, but unavoidable long term perhaps if summers go on like this?
It is a relief, therefore, to depart from such troubles and to be able to bring you an extraordinary story from within the Arctic Circle. We are off to the mighty Alta.
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As I sit watching the Open Golf, the immediate past in both the cricketing and golfing worlds has produced some remarkable results, England winning four test matches on the spin against two of the best teams in the world, and Matt Fitzpatrick winning the US Open golf.
In the salmon fishing world, now that Russia has gone, Norwegian rivers, and especially the Alta, for large Atlantic salmon in particular, are the places to go.
Even for the Alta, what follows is as astonishing as those recent cricket and golf results, and makes one wonder if the many predictions of the demise of the Atlantic salmon are unnecessarily alarmist.
Four fishers, sharing two rods, and fishing mostly at night over just 6 nights (it never gets dark there in mid-summer), caught 87 salmon and grilse, all on a fly (of course). Of the 87, 60 were salmon and they all weighed over 20lbs, the other 27 were grilse and in the best possible condition. Each of the four sharing caught a salmon of 35lbs or more (although nothing over 40lbs). You can see from some of these pictures that, as examples of the best of the Atlantic salmon species, none are better.
So who were the lucky fishers? Well although luck no doubt has a big part of it, in that the fish have to be there and the river in good order, having played golf with some of them, and knowing their all too obvious natural abilities at almost everything, we can be assured that nobody/ies could have caught more.
The Innes-Ker “team”, Charlie, Rosie, Ted and George, all children of my old friend the previous Duke of Roxburghe who tragically died far too young almost three years ago at the age of 64, has beaten their father’s record for 6 nights fishing on the Alta. Nothing if not competitive, he would have been both cross, in the nicest possible, hand on your shoulder and “how the hell did you catch so many?” sort of way, but also immensely pleased for, and proud of, them all.
As for all of us practitioners of the angle, this tale of incomparable Atlantic salmon fishing, and the accompanying pictures, give us hope. I am most grateful to “the team” in allowing me to publish this most happy, and extraordinary, of family fishing tales.
All is well.
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