1 July 2018 News/Editorial
Some snippets this week.
It is too hot for me to write, and you to want to read, anything longer.
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The Tweed rod catch last week was 33 salmon and 36 sea trout, making cumulative totals to 30th June 2018 some 1,003 salmon and 249 sea trout, within 90% accuracy.
Proprietors have just received from the River Tweed Commission their beat Catch Return forms for spring catches to 30th June. These have to be completed and back with the RTC by Wednesday 18th July, at the latest.
Only after these have been analysed, will we know quite how Spring 2018 ranks amongst springs of recent years.
The worst for some years was 2009 with 1,147 salmon.
If our running totals, as shown above, are correct to within 10% error, 2018 has every chance of being worse than 2009.
But in that we are not alone.
Some similarly depressing statistics may well be true of every single salmon river in Scotland so far this year.
And this hot, dry weather is going on…..and on…. for at least another week.
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My kind correspondent tells me that the NE drift netters are, thus far, finding very few salmon to catch at sea.
This could be partly because their monofilament nets are much more visible in sharply bright and flat calm conditions at sea….or it could be that there just are not many fish.
Somewhere in my enfeebled brain is a vague recollection that when high pressures anchor themselves over the UK, all netsmen, historically, do badly. It is as if the fish know that there is no point coming anywhere near shore, because prolonged high pressure means drought, and no water to allow easy access to rivers.
The lack of fish in the sea could simply be timing ie they are going to come later this year…...or it could be…..
……..well let’s not consider an alternative explanation, quite yet anyway.
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CEFAS have, at last, released the NE drift and T&J net fishery catch for the 2017 season.
The 11 drift netters and 47 T&J net licencees declared a catch of 9,157 salmon, compared to 18,824 in 2016, a reduction of more than 50%.
These 9,157 salmon weighed 36,359 kg or nearly 8 lbs each, meaning they were mainly 2 sea winter salmon.
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While England football fans contemplate a re-run of 1966, my mind, after the ceaseless sunshine and heat of the last few days, turned to the last great summer of 1976.
There were several records broken that year, the first that, somewhere in the UK, between the end of June 1976 and beginning of July, temperatures exceeded 32c on 15 consecutive days. In addition, in south west England, in July and August, there were 45 consecutive days with no rain whatever.
So what was Tweed fishing like?
I was footloose and fancy free, and working in Edinburgh, that year, so very available to fish.
Unsurprisingly, my personal fishing book records almost nothing caught, with references for the very few I did catch, to “summer levels” and catching them “before breakfast”.....because it was so hot in the day.
Equally unsurprisingly, 1976 was a very poor year for Tweed salmon rod catches, about the worst we ever had post 1960, if you exclude the UDN years of 1967-1969. The summer heat and drought inevitably led to the exact opposite in October 1976, my book recording on 4th November that it was “at last fishable after 5 weeks constant flooding”.
So 3 months drought and heat, followed by a month flooding.
In 2018, so far we have had one month (June) of heat and drought.
Just like England footballers and 1966, it is far too early for we fishermen, or anyone else, to make any comparisons with 1976.
The most likely repeat of the two?
1976.
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As water temperatures last week reached the mid 70sF, how does this affect the fish in the river?
In short, not well. They are cold water fish.
Some American/Canadian rivers ban all rod fishing at these sorts of water temperatures, on the basis that, as the salmon caught have to be released, they will suffer too much in being played, and often cannot recover in such hot water.
We have not gone that far here on the Tweed, and you could argue that our fish clearly feel sufficiently lethargic that they are almost impossible to catch anyway.
But if you do catch one and release it, you need to play it hard and get it in quickly, without over exhausting it, and keep it in the water while unhooking it, to maximise chances of recovery.
Which also means….no photos of it halfway up the bank.
Or as Nick Faldo’s long time caddie, Fanny Sunesson, used to say in a rather officious Germanic sounding voice, reminiscent of Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo, as her charge was about to hit his driver down the fairway….
“No Pictures!!”
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