news/editorial

1 February 2015 News/Editorial

We welcome the new season with a procedural matter, an important change of law, which all Tweed spring fishers MUST understand.

Whereas, for the last few years, the RTC and proprietors have implemented voluntary 100% catch and release for salmon up to 30th June, from 2015 this has changed so that, up to and including 31st March, it will be illegal, a criminal offence, to take a rod caught salmon.

This means that even if it dies, a salmon must be left in the water and not retained.

From 1st April until 30th June, even if not supported by law, the previous RTC and proprietor-led policy of 100% catch and release for salmon still applies, but sea trout may be killed and retained.

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With the 2015 season just around the corner, we are starting with a paper by Peter Straker-Smith (with his kind permission) sent recently to his Carham tenants.

Unlike some of the more extreme reactions to what happened in 2014, it is both informative and balanced in looking both back and forward.

It is the conceit of every generation that they are experiencing something new; this is seldom true and talk, by some of the more lunatic fringe, of salmon “extinction” (albeit qualified by applying it to its “southern range”) is ridiculous.

Here it is.

CARHAM REVIEW 2014

2014 was not even a half-decent fishing year – a poor spring was followed by a modest summer and a poor autumn, finished off by a dire November. There were some high spots – particularly a cracking opening week and a decent spell in August – and the bitter pill was sweetened by generally pleasant weather which helped people to enjoy catching not very much, but the bare statistics tell the story: a salmon catch of 130 salmon (against a five-year average (‘FYA’) of 363 and the lowest total since 1985) and every month’s catches were below the FYA. Luckily the sea-trout story was different – dead on FYA at 37 for the year, not bad considering the drought in July (normally the best sea-trout month of the year).

What went wrong? We do not know, and probably never will. Similar effects were suffered across the north Atlantic, which rules out local causes (e.g. inadequacy of smolt production and early post-smolt feed issues) and any unusual effects from man’s predation of returning salmon (including those perennial bogeymen, the drift and coastal nets and pelagic trawlers) – these are clearly important to the welfare of salmon, but cannot be blamed for 2014 being so much worse than previous years across such a wide area. The fish that returned to Tweed were of decent size and in good condition, which does not indicate that they were particularly short of food. On Tweed at least, the numbers of grilse and multi-sea winter fish seem to have been similarly affected.

Is this the start of a long term problem? We do not know, and will not know until many years have passed. In the 80 years for which we have full records on this beat, we have 3 similar instances – all followed by different stories. In 1940 (when most of the world was concentrating on other things and pelagic fishing was not practicable), Carham produced 152 salmon on the back of an FYA of 383 – catches recovered the next year and through to 1944 (average 335) but were weaker from 1945 to 1955 (average 198) and (except for the boom years of 1957, 1958 and 1960) stayed much the same through to the mid 1960s. 81 were caught in 1967 following an FYA of 208 – this was the first year of the collapse of the spring fishery associated with UDN and catches remained weak until the grilse and autumn runs built up in the 1980s: from 1967 to 1979 we averaged 70 salmon, with a high of 101 and a low of 30. In 1996, our salmon catch slumped to 156 following an FYA of 336, which was immediately followed by a recovery to the high 200s (the 7 years 1997 to 2003 averaged 264) and the fine 10 years 2004-2013 which averaged 376.

We have incomplete records back to the start of the 20^th century which indicate a slump similar to that of the 1960s & 1970s when the grilse and autumn runs declined before the spring runs built up through the First World War.

In the short-term we have every reason to believe that there have been quite enough spawning fish in the system in 2014 to fully populate the burns with fry next year, and so far this winter has not produced dramatic spates to wash out the redds – so there is no cause for panic. Next year’s returning salmon will mostly be 2013 and 2014 smolts – we believe that they left Tweed in good order and decent numbers, but we cannot know how they are faring at sea.

In sum, we know dramatic falls in catches happen from time to time. Some have been blips, others have been followed by lowered catches for a number of years. To date, all such falls have been followed (sooner or later) by recovery. Man’s knowledge of salmon at sea is rudimentary, so there is little we can do beyond encouraging others to restrict or stop interceptory netting of salmon (whether intentional or accidental) and encouraging research that might help us to understand more about salmon at sea, alongside continuing to ensure the health of the Tweed system.