19 October 2014 News/Editorial
“Gilbert” (he was French, pronounced “Jilbear”) has a Syndrome, as many as 1 in 10 people have it, almost all, like me, undiagnosed.
I have a brother and nephew who have it for sure, it is genetic, comparatively harmless and incurable, so even though I am convinced I have it too, I will not be bothering the NHS with testing my bilirubin levels.
Because of “Gilbert”, I cannot eat a lot, and therefore my concept of “enough” in the food stakes is very much lower than it would otherwise be. I will not be getting fat anytime soon.
If Dickens had been a “Gilbert” man, the literary world would have been deprived of Oliver ever saying to the fat master “Please, sir, I want some more”.
Indeed, had he known, Oliver might well have said to the fat master “you clearly do not have
“Gilbert”” and been spared both a smack from the master’s ladle and a sentence of hanging by the board member in a white waistcoat.
“Enough”, of course, always has to be qualified ie “enough for what”? In the food stakes, there is a massive difference between “enough to survive quite happily, and “enough to fill my stomach”, unless you are a martyr, like me, to “Gilbert”, in which case the two are much the same.
There are those who think I have invented “Gilbert” as an excuse to avoid going out to dinner, despite my naturally gregarious and sociable character, where you are invariably given too much to eat.
This is, need one say, both tosh and a foul slur.
“Where on earth is he going with this?”, I hear you cry. “This is supposed to be a fishing column”.
Aha, well you see, there is method in what must, thus far, have appeared both madness, and, maybe, even…. drivel.
In a year when salmon are absent in normal numbers, such as this, all right thinking people immediately worry that “there may not be enough for the future?”, a very different proposition to “are there enough for us to catch?”.
The Atlantic salmon is an extraordinarily resilient creature, with mind boggling capacity to procreate and prosper, despite all the many dangers (mostly man made) and diseases encountered over the centuries. That we still have large populations is a minor miracle, and says more about the hardiness of the species than it does about man in protecting it.
Consider the ravages of the industrial revolution, the building of caulds on every tributary and throughout the main stem for power and with scant regard to the free passage of fish, the appalling pollution that resulted from industrialisation in all Border towns, to say nothing of the shortsighted and profit driven proprietors who went out of their way to catch as many fish as possible, by netting , trapping, blocking off fish passes and numerous other horrors, for the lucrative London markets.
Where one female 20 lber carries over 10,000 eggs, the capacity for renewal and revival is truly astonishing, and whereas with strong competition for food and space in the spawning areas, you might expect surprisingly few of those 10,000 to result in smolts going down to the sea 1, 2 or 3 years later, with less competition (from a poor year such as this) a very much greater percentage of the eggs should make it to smolting stages and beyond.
It is this natural oversupply which, together with the accessibility of almost all spawning areas in the Tweed system (we have 15% of the spawning area of the total of all of Scotland’s salmon rivers on Tweed), now that the 19th century caulds have been breached and made passable, that allows us to be comparatively sanguine about the long term consequences of a lower than normal run of salmon this year.
The second “enough”, ie “are there enough to catch?”, is a different matter altogether. I hope I am not misquoting Orri Vigfusson when he deliberately talks about “angling abundance” (when complaining about the ravages of the nets), a very different thing to abundance simply for successful procreation.
From Dr. Ronald Campbell’s sampling and tagging, we now know that anglers (he says “because we are not very good at it!”) never catch more than 1 in 20 salmon that come into the river in the autumn (indeed more often 3%, which is 1 in 33). The catch rate will be very much higher for springers simply because they are in the river longer.
So, in simple terms, if we want to catch say 10,000 autumn salmon pa (the average has been 14,000 of late, 16,000 pa including 2,000 springers), we need a run of 200,000 autumn fish to make that possible.
Let us suppose that, this year, we catch only 5,000 autumn fish, even allowing for a higher catch rate where total numbers are lower, that could mean up to 100,000 autumn salmon coming into the river by 30th November.
“Enough” for successful spawning, it would seem, but not enough for the sort of Tweed autumn fishing we have become accustomed to.
Even so, if it were me, more than ever this year, I would not think twice before putting back that 20 lb hen, even if covered in sea lice.
You should do the same.
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