news/editorial

19 November 2017 News/Editorial

The rod catch last week was 66 salmon and 2 sea trout, making the cumulative Tweed catch, to 18th November 2017, 6,106 salmon and 1,670 sea trout.

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Fishing on Tuesday and Wednesday last week was enough; my neck, damaged by an earlier life of fishing too much, allowed no more, before recovery began with (a) no more fishing, (b) painkillers and (c) the ubiquitous Deep Heat.

Although others had a few pulls, only one sea-licer hung on and, as the scores elsewhere graphically testified, the river has effectively shut down. Quite simply, almost no fresh fish are coming in, and the old ones are spawning.

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So why the aforementioned (last week) optimism for 2018?

Because 2018 salmon will be the first generation of salmon (for technicians of these things, 1:2s from the 2014 parental group) untroubled by competing with the progeny of thousands of grilse (because in 2014 there were no grilse). 2019 will be even better because there will be 2:2 salmon from 2014 and 1:2s from 2015 (when there were also no grilse).

Because (I sincerely hope) the Gardo net will be stopped from netting our spring salmon altogether from 2018 onwards, hopefully only being allowed to kill salmon from sometime in June.

Because surely, at last, 50 years after the same thing happened in Scotland, the English NE drift nets will be stopped altogether, finally ending an unacceptable indiscriminate fishery.

It has been an international embarrassment for years, the UK, rightly, being accused of hypocrisy when criticising other countries (Greenland, the Faroes, Ireland) for operating interceptory fisheries (all of which have now closed) when the UK was doing exactly the same off its English NE coast.

From a Scottish perspective, the undisputed fact that 75% of the salmon being caught there were Scottish, not English, has been a running sore over decades. The drift netters have, for years, lined up north of Newcastle, because they knew that the biggest catches were to be had by intercepting Scottish salmon, and the closer to the Scottish border they could fish, the more they would catch.

Many of us have been campaigning to have that fishery closed down for the last 40 years, and it just may be about to happen.

And finally, I am optimistic because the Tweed is in such good shape; there are no obstructions to stop salmon reaching the spawning beds, the spawning streams are in excellent condition, there is plenty of food for juvenile fish to survive and prosper, the water is clean and pure, there are no nets (bar one part-time), and Tweed salmon fishermen and ghillies are astonishingly conservation minded when it comes to allowing the salmon they catch to survive and spawn. And for those obsessed by our avian predators, we are even now being allowed to harass (and in some cases kill) both goosanders and cormorants over a much extended period, whereas before it was restricted to a few months in the spring.

For a naturally “glass half empty” type, I find myself surprisingly optimistic for the future.

But if you want to go back to having over 60 full time in-river and coastal Tweed nets, obstructions everywhere, over 120 NE drift netters, a remarkably unclean river with the mills of Galashiels, Selkirk and Hawick pouring all sorts of horrors into the river, with rod caught salmon all being killed and sold……..all of which was true of when I started fishing in the 1950s and 1960s?

Be my guest!