news/editorial

20 November 2016 News/Editorial

As fishing, predictably, shuts down two weeks early, despite reliable reports of fresh salmon running the Till system, the scores for last week indicate, more clearly than anything I can write, that the main river has very little in it, or at least nothing, and I mean literally nothing, at all fresh.

It is the sheer speed of what appears to be happening to the Tweed that has shaken us. I say “appears” most advisedly for, as with most things salmon, nobody knows for sure what is happening.

Let us first agree something about November, which is that you will catch very little in November if all you have in the river is early running fish, quite simply because those fish will spawn in October and November. You can still catch early running fish in October, as indeed we have this year, but not after that. For this purpose, I am defining early running fish as those which come into the river before the end of July.

Now let us look at some facts, ah “facts”, a precious commodity in all this.

The Tweed November rod catch (in round 100s) since 2011 has been:

2011 1,900

2012 1,500

2013 4,500

2014 1,000

2015 700

2016 350 (?)

Now, of course, the 2016 figure could be/will be wrong, but with only 10 days to go, you wouldn’t bet on getting much above the 350 shown. It might be a struggle to get there, despite some pretty reasonable fishing conditions (for November) so far.

The other factor, of which all November fishers are aware, is the weather. Notoriously prone to flooding, recorded fish catches by rod and line can only ever be a rough indicator of abundance. Nonetheless, the rapid regression in the table above does not look good if you hold to the belief that the Tweed still has a thriving population of late running salmon.

If, on the other hand, based on these figures and on personal experiences of what we have all seen in the river this autumn, you conclude that something has changed, you might also think that the speed of it all is astonishing.

Which got me thinking.

What was it like the last time the Tweed went from a late running river to an early one, between 1910 and 1925? And what we mean by that, amongst all the distant “facts”, is that all we do know is that it was an autumn river pre 1910, and a mainly spring/summer one post 1925. Of the precise detail, of how it went from one to the other, we know very little.

So something happened somewhere in the middle, but was it quick, or a gradual 15 year thing?

Any definitive assessment of this may be impossible, sadly complicated by the horrors of the 1st War 1914-1918 and lack of knowledge of rod fishing effort, if any, during those years.

What we do know, for instance, is that Hugh Valdive Warrender, fishing at Sprouston on November 4th 1912, caught 8 salmon in the day, weights 38,26,23,23,22,17,17,14, an average of 22 1/2lbs. A snapshot only, of course, but little sign there, in 1912, of what appears to be happening here in 2016, or of what had happened then by 1925.

Long ago I used to have an office in Berwick, where netting folklore and tradition is still strong, even more so then in the 1980s. I recall talking to old netsmen and those who worked for and ran the Berwick Salmon Company and the Holmes Group, the main netting operators, and the one thing I recall they all said, is that when the change came in the 1920s, it was a total surprise. They had almost stopped bothering to net in February and March because for many years there was little/nothing to catch...very much as now. Suddenly, in the mid 1920s, they realised that the river was full of salmon from as soon as they could legally net on 15th February….and from then for the next 40 years their whole schedule of netting changed.

From 1925, they were on the river on 15th February, and the spring was where they made most of their money.

And just when you are being lulled into believing there will be a linear solution to all this, there won’t, do not be fooled.

In 1941, 520 salmon were caught here, 88 in October and 40 in November, and they would have been proper big autumn salmon.

Not just a spring river in 1941, autumn fish too.

And in 1962, the height of the huge spring runs, I have a cutting from the local paper on August 2nd of that year and of the Crabwater net catching a record 153 fish in one haul of the net, which the netsmen struggled to bring ashore. They were mainly grilse, just one haul of one net on one day, amidst a week of very “heavy” catches.

Not just a spring river in 1962, massive runs of grilse in the summer too.

So there we have it, uncertainties abound.

But if we are in the process of change to earlier (pre-July) fish:

(a) It could be surprisingly/shockingly quick.

(b) It will most probably still involve late summer grilse and autumn salmon, to a greater or lesser extent, year by year, just as we still had spring fish during the “autumn salmon and grilse” years.

Moreover, if change it is to something like what happened after 1925, there is nothing whatever in the records I have here, of catches in the following 40 years, to be frightened of.

On the contrary, it could be both very different and very exciting.

In the week of 12th November 1903, Mr AP Kidson caught 26 fish to his own rod here, 23 salmon averaging 21 lbs (biggest 32 and 30lbs), and 3 grilse.

35 years later, on 7th February 1938, the same Mr AP Kidson, fishing at Sprouston, caught 10 sparkling spring salmon weighing 11,10,9,9,9,9,9,8,8,8,8 lbs, all on a fly he called “ The Garry”.

I have a picture of him sitting proudly in the boat, holding his greenhart rod, beaming joyfully at the camera, as the boatman holds up the latest capture.

AP Kidson lived through the 1910-1925 change, and saw the best of both the autumn, before it, and the spring, after it.

Lucky man.