news/editorial

20 August 2023 News/Editorial

Rather as old age can be a pain, so can rain, but both are a lot better than the alternatives, respectively not making it into old age, and drought. Some last week found themselves with dirty, near unfishable water on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, the first thanks to a thunderstorm in Hawick/Selkirk on Tuesday afternoon, the second care of Storm Betty on Friday night.

Inevitably, catch figures suffered, with the only fully settled days, Tuesday and Friday providing around half the week’s catches. As explained ad nauseam, total figures are hard to come by, but with some 210 salmon on the two websites, around 300 might be about the size of it for the week, pretty good given the waterborne disruptions.

For comparison, 2022 being the hottest and driest August of recent times, just 393 salmon were caught whereas the recent 5/10 year norm is around 1,100, best since 2009 being 2011’s astonishing 3,388. With ten August fishing days still to go in 2023, with the score up to 20th August already approaching 1,000, it would be disappointing if the end result did not comfortably exceed that 1,100 5/10 year “norm”.

Why so, you ask? First, of course, we have had water, even on large rivers like Tweed, the sine qua non of successful summer salmon fishing. Secondly, in an age when we have been told to expect salmon (more than 1 year in the sea) to predominate, as opposed to grilse (just one year in the sea), we have had grilse in 2023, and in some numbers. Of course there are good big summer salmon too, but the scores would have been very much reduced had there been no grilse.

You will recall that, of all recent years, it was only 2020 that produced noticeably more salmon/grilse, and despite many days fishing lost to Covid lockdown, was by far the best Tweed catch of the last ten years. Have some of their progeny come back as grilse? Who knows, but it has been a very marked, and welcome, departure, and we are still seeing fresh salmon and grilse into late August, something nobody saw in 2022. Long may it continue.

As for next week, warm-ish, then cool and showery seems to be the consensus, certainly no heatwave, and it will be a matter of luck as to whether we get more watery disruptions from dirty rises/small floods. The biggest rise of the summer, indeed since April, is running off as this is being written (Sunday pm), dropping from just below 3ft at Coldstream, so that enough water is assured for the week ahead.

It could, stress “could”, be good.

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Golfers will know that they play a selfish game; nobody is really interested in how you play, they are only interested in themselves. I went round the first 10 holes at the Hirsel last week in 3 over par, and it should have been better, missing a couple of easy putts. An average duffer, this was a rare event in an otherwise imperfect golfing life. My three companions never uttered a word of appreciation, barely a “good shot” to be heard, quite simply they both never noticed and couldn’t have cared less. As I say, a sociable but ultimately selfish game.

The same could be said of salmon beats, Kelso, at best Galashiels, centricity demanding that nobody is bothered what happens in Upper Tweed, Teviot, Till, Ettrick or Whiteader, except, of course, those who live, and fish, there.

So let me mention Upper Caberston, way up above Galashiels in Upper Tweed, for they have caught 8 salmon and 9 sea trout there so far this year, not many you might say, but for them it is a lot at this time of the year. One salmon was in March (yes, springers do go up there) and five so far in August, and with water, there is every chance they will catch more before August ends.

The problem with lack of water and with mainly summer salmon/grilse coming in, is that it is very undemocratic, in other words, by and large the lower down the beat, the more salmon it will see/catch from February right through to November. The variation on this theme is the spring, where those around Kelso tend to do best, until June/July when catch preponderance switches inexorably downstream.

There is nothing to be done about this, albeit were the spring run ever to return in strength, as from there 1930s to 1960s, the upper reaches and all tributaries would catch many more, much earlier. I learnt to fish at Upper Pavilion, just below Upper Tweed, in the 1960s, and catching sea-liced springers there in our April school holiday was totally normal. Willie Thyne of the Yair, well into Upper Tweed, told me of many years in the 1950s and 1960 when they caught a lot of salmon in March, April and May. Since UDN struck in 1967, those days of spring catches in Upper Tweed have never returned.

So there you have it. Upper Caberston is having a good start to its fishing year, and long may that continue.