20 June 2021 News/Editorial
Of the 70 salmon caught last week, in calmer and cooler weather, with the river at summer level, again the minority, by far, were caught below Coldstream. June has been dry, very dry, with consequent diminution both in the places and pools you can fish. The forecast for next week offers little relief.
And so it goes on. I walk by the river, the Temple Pool, every day in life. As we approach the end of June, I have seen just a single salmon jump there, in nearly 5 months of this season so far. In perfect conditions for the lowest beats, I hear one of them had over 200 rod days before catching one salmon only this late May/June. Another beat has caught nothing for 5 weeks.
Last year’s Tweed rod catch in June was 1,143 salmon; here on the 21st June, with little over a week to go, the 2021 June catch will be no more than 250 salmon.
I cannot contemplate anglers and boatmen/ghillies being free to kill any salmon on the Tweed as from 1st July. The scientists may say there is no reason not to kill fish after 1st July. So be it. It is up to the RTC to assess the political situation for salmon Scotland wide, to say nothing about the current lack of fish, and take a stand. There is more to decision making than pure scientific advice, an important factor of course, but far from the only one.
I hope the summer fish begin to appear here in numbers soon; when they do, that will change what is said here not one jot. Needle stuck on a broken record maybe. I have a vain hope that what is written here will influence decision making on the river bank, that crucial moment when anglers and ghillies decide whether to kill a salmon or not. In that single moment, the game, the salmon species survival game, is either won or lost. Look that salmon in the eye and convince yourself you are doing the right thing by knocking its brains out, by denying it its ultimate destination on the spawning beds.
Your decision.
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Some say I go too far in exhorting, begging almost, fishers not to kill salmon after that date. The RTC encourages “restraint” and has agreed that no hens should be killed after 15th September, but a stronger message is needed. It is not enough, it is woefully deficient, and, at the risk of more tedious repetition, effectively results in up to 1,100 salmon (or 4 tonnes) being killed by Tweed rods every year, way way more than any other river in the UK, and more than most of them added together.
Why do anglers come here? They come to catch fish, and go away happy if they have seen and caught some. Do you ask a fellow angler “how many have you killed today”? Never. We are only interested in catching, not killing, and so we ask ”how many have you caught today?” for a reason. Do anglers not go to Russia because they cannot kill them on those amazing Kola rivers? Of course not.
Those who continue the absurd, self-serving, mantra that tenants will be lost if 100% catch and release comes in all year round are talking through their hats. Look at other rivers, are they absent any fishers because they expect everything to be released? Are they hell? The Tweed is lamentably out of step. The Atlantic salmon as a “species in crisis” is the all too justified message, Scotland and UK wide. Except on the Tweed, it seems.
Regardless of what the RTC does, or does not say, we can all, of course, decide for ourselves that killing these precious fish, the few survivors, is not acceptable. If you and your children, and their children after that, want to keep coming here to catch salmon, then please ask yourself, why would you even think of killing them?
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After last year, what has happened in 2021 so far has been a shock, a wake-up call to those who thought that 2020 heralded a new dawn. Maybe it was the start of a new dawn-ing, but a patchy and bumpy one, most likely with some good years and others most distinctly not so good.
The mystery remains as to why this is so. It is a wholly wild resource, essentially unpredictable, and as much as we crave certainty, because we love it and we like to catch fish, in a way it is the uncertainty and surprise that is so addictive. In other words, be careful what you wish for. But this year, and for most of the years since 2014, that unpredictability, and for the most part lack of fish, has gone too far.
One thing is undeniable, that the numbers of salmon now returning to our shores, even in the good years, are a fraction of what they once were. Apart from the part time Gardo net, the Tweed now has no netting. In the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, a mixture of North East Drift and T&J nets (sometimes over 100,000 salmon and grilse pa), our own 30+ river and coastal nets (also sometimes over 100,000 salmon and grilse pa) to say nothing of the Greenlanders, the Faroese and other offshore nets around Scotland (they measured their catches of salmon and grilse in tonnes, not numbers of fish), and yet there were, except in the summer months, enough salmon left over for the rods to catch.
One of the more extraordinary statistics is that in 1971, 2,689 tonnes of salmon were caught and killed off West Greenland. Their quota in 2020 was just 21 tonnes, a reduction of 2,668 tonnes, yet there will still be fewer salmon going back to their home rivers in North America and Europe.
Even last year, imagine how few salmon there would have been in the Tweed if all those nets had been operating. It could have been wipe-out, or nearly, with over 120 drift nets off the Northumbrian coast and fulltime netting in-river right up to Coldstream.
Which brings us to the same conclusion, why kill any of the depleted numbers that make it back here now, whether you are technically allowed to or not?
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