news/editorial

18 November 2018 News/Editorial

Last week’s Tweed rod catches were 24 salmon and 7 sea trout, bringing the season’s totals to 5,349 salmon and 698 sea trout to 17th November 2018...all within 90% accuracy

Although the river settled somewhat from Thursday after flooding for the first 3 days of last week, it was more of the same, with little or no sign of any fresh fish.

The river may well settle down next week as the wind veers easterly, the temperature cools considerably and it remains largely dry, bar some pretty unpleasant heavy showers coming in off the coast on Tuesday and Wednesday.

With the 2017 November catch sinking to just 374 salmon, itself the lowest November total for decades, it seems most unlikely that November 2018 will get anywhere near that meagre score.

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The salmon hatchery debate hit the newspapers this morning, with the Sunday Times reporting that the Spey’s annual hatchery output of 500,000 fry may be increased to 1 million for 2019.

At the same time, it is reported that, of a sample of just over 800 salmon caught on the Spey, just 2 were shown by genetic fingerprinting to have come from the hatchery, or just 0.23%.

If the annual Spey catch this year is some 3,000 salmon (as my Trout & Salmon magazine reports), this means that just 7 of those will have come from the hatchery…...at very considerable cost.

And, of course, that figure of 7 takes no account of the salmon that were caught and stripped for their eggs to go to the hatchery. Had they spawned naturally, they may well have produced more than 7 towards the 2018 Spey catch.

I have the greatest respect and sympathy for those running the Spey. I know and admire them for the excellent job they do in almost impossible circumstances. I imagine they have been under almost intolerable political pressure to increase the hatchery output, despite the fact that they know it does not work.

The philosophy seems to be it is better to be seen to be doing something……

.... even if you know it will make not one jot of difference.

Will this sort of news from the Spey silence the pro-hatchery brigade here on the Tweed?

I very much doubt it.

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“How can this be?” you might well ask.

For those of us brought up to believe that the parent generation for 2017 grilse and 2018 salmon was 4 and 5 years earlier respectively, you should be able to look at November 2013 for an explanation of such low November scores on the Tweed over the last two years.

Yet November 2013 was one of the most prolific Novembers ever, with the notable exception of the annus mirabilis that was 2010.

An astonishing (in hindsight) 4,500+ salmon and grilse were caught by rod and line on the Tweed in November 2013.

Yet their children have failed completely. If ever there was an example of some cataclysmic event having happened, this is it. Of course, it started some years earlier because the failure of autumn 2014 was the first time we noticed the lack of fresh fish coming into the river in the “back end” months, meaning that it was the parent generations of 2009 and 2010 that were the first to be blamed.

Even odder then that a staggering 19,000 salmon and grilse were caught by the rods in September, October and November 2010. Their children too, the offspring of that vast number of the 2010 salmon and grilse population, have also almost completely failed in the dismal autumn catches of 2014 and 2015..

It simply is not credible to think that such vast numbers of broodstock did not produce enough juveniles to go to sea as smolts.

What is credible is that huge numbers of smolts did indeed go to sea….

.... but almost none of them made it back.

Believers in historical precedent will point to previous well documented dramatically sudden (marine induced) changes in salmon run timings, both here on the Tweed and elsewhere, and put it all down to that.

Others are more sceptical and think something much newer, and more worryingly fundamental, is going on, perhaps for the first time and brought on by the sheer rapidity of man-made global warming.... which is making life, in all its phases, pretty tough, and much more marginal in very basic survival terms, for a cold water species such as our Atlantic salmon.

If the sceptics are right, and they may well be, we really could be in for a major fight to save the Atlantic salmon as a species....because the far reaching changes within the swirling faraway currents of the northern oceans is something over which we humans have no control whatever.

If, however, as my father for one truly believed, to the extent that he told me it would happen in my lifetime, it is all part of the naturally occurring cyclical nature of salmon runs which has been going on for centuries, then all should be well in time.

But unless and until the spring and summer salmon runs improve, as some confidently predict, to replace what has evidently been lost in the demise of those very large runs of late summer and autumn salmon and grilse pre 2014…..

.... then the jury is out as to whether the natural cycle is the (only temporary) guilty party in our present extreme discomfiture.

Or is it something far worse, with no historical precedent…. and potentially more permanent?

2019 will not provide the whole answer, as no single year on its own can….

...but it might get us a little closer to the truth.