18 August 2019 News/Editorial
Despite there being only four fishable days, and some of those pretty marginal thanks to the 8 ft flood on Monday and then another lift on Saturday, last week was by some distance the most productive of Tweed’s year so far.
The scores were 229 salmon and 186 sea trout for the week, making the cumulative totals 2,715 salmon and 1,401 sea trout for the season to 17th August 2019.
To the uninitiated, the sea trout score might seem a thing of beauty, until more sobre and realistic commentators point out that, most probably, 90% of them were caught on something called a “rapala”, or another similar piece of ironmongery. Curiously, your scribe, not known for his love of any matters spinning, was reasonably relaxed about the proliferation of flashing and bobbing lures in this instance, even if personally finding the whole business pretty abhorrent. However, the river was, for the most part, big and murky, and the odd thing about Tweed’s sea trout (or “slob” trout as my old friend James Euston used to call them) is that the only time you can catch them, on anything in any numbers, is both when the river is coloured and when you offer them some flashing ironmongery as bait. Whether it is any real fun catching sea trout on a lure and spinning rod, and reeling them in at anything under 4lbs very much as you would a mackerel, is a matter of personal choice.
As for next week, as I write, there is a hint of something like high pressure nudging in from the south later in the week, which could quieten things down, after a windy and showery start. Beware these high pressures at this time of year, they can hang around and bring both hot and dry Septembers, and after the unsettled August we are enduring, you would not bet against it.
If and when the river settles, the fishing could be very good for a while. Despite the salmon numbers caught last week, and without wishing to be a killjoy, the jury is still well and truly out on how many fish there really are/are going to be in the river.
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I have been remiss in not pointing out that CEFAS has now published the salmon catch figures in England and Wales for 2018.
You can get it all here https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/810720/SalmonReport-2018-assessment_final.pdf
The North East net fishery comprising 11 drift nets and 42 T&J nets caught 9,909 salmon in 2018. Of these 56% were multi sea winter ie not grilse, whereas pre 2010 MSW fish were more likely to comprise around just 30% of the catch.
It would be nice to think this change is because there are more big fish, whereas of course the real answer is more likely to be that the grilse component is much weaker.
If nothing else, we can conclude that at least 10,000 salmon and grilse will escape their demise thanks to no netting this year, and maybe many more, unless you think that compulsory carcass tagging in 2018 meant that the nets truly declared their full catch.
I could not possibly comment.
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And, finally, a picture to raise your blood pressure, an aerial pic of the sands around Holy Island off the Northumbrian coast, about 10 miles south of Tweed’s estuary.
At high tide, when the area those seals are lying around in is under water, just imagine how any salmon nosing its way up the coast towards the Tweed would meet a terrifying phalanx of voracious killers, through which it would have to pass to get to base.
My kind castellated correspondents sent me other pictures of more lazy predators lying in wait on other sandbanks around Holy Island, but I have not shown them all, for fear of inducing collective apoplexy.
As the late great Orri Vigfusson said when I sat on the very comfortable fur-lined seat in his car in Iceland “The only good seal is a dead seal”, which is exactly what many Icelanders think and unashamedly say, coming from a culture where catching and eating enough fish was a matter of life and death.
It may not be that for us humans in the UK, but it could be for our salmon.
As with so many things, the proliferation of predators since the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 has reached crisis point, be it goosanders, cormorants or seals. That they are thriving in such either completely or comparatively uncontrolled numbers is, at least partly, at the direct expense and existential peril of their prey species.
Our salmon.
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