news/editorial

21 April 2019 News/Editorial

In both blazing sunshine and unaccustomed heat from Thursday, the Tweed catch dropped to 71 salmon and 6 sea trout last week, making the running total 447 salmon and 48 sea trout for the 2019 season to date.

With the ground so dry and both trees and plants now bursting into life, it will take quite some rain both to satisfy them and to rise the river. The forecast, while becoming more unsettled in the coming week, predicts showers from mid-week but little in the way of a reliable deluge, with the consequent likelihood that water levels will continue to drop, therefore favouring the angling prospects of the lowest beats.

There is a feeling abroad that things are much better this year than they were last, but I can find little evidence of that. Andrew Flitcroft, editor of Trout & Salmon magazine, on the basis of catching just one springer himself, feels it in his bones, but based on very little encouraging numerical catch data from any of the Scottish east coast rivers. Here on the Tweed, we should get past 500 salmon by the end of April after 3 months fishing. The 2018 equivalent was 434 salmon, 2019 is better, but certainly not by much.

The total Tweed score for 2018 to the end of June was 1,083 salmon. A “good” spring in recent times, has been + or - 2,000. Even those who bet on Tiger Woods winning at Augusta, might think twice before putting money on getting there.

But you never know.

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Can anyone explain why it is still illegal to fish for migratory fish in Scotland on a Sunday? There is no logic to it, as they say in these parts “it’s aye been” and so it goes on, largely unquestioned.

But it is totally bonkers, you can do almost everything else on a Sunday, but a harmless, peaceful, contemplative bit of fishing for salmon and sea trout is illegal. Yes, you could be prosecuted for doing it, but not if you are fishing for non-migratory brown trout, which is perfectly legal. Explain that, if you will!? Fishing is fishing whether it is for salmon, sea trout or brown trout, and of course the legal position is even more complex now that we know that brown trout and sea trout are the same species, just that one goes to sea and the other chooses not to. Tweed law, by contrast and incorrectly, classes a sea trout as a distinct separate species and equivalent to a salmon, when it is neither.

It all goes back to the Church and the religious (Presbyterian) background to our laws in Scotland, and it is complicated. But would the Church, or anyone else for that matter, really object to someone salmon fishing on a Sunday now? There will always be some objectors, “the fish need a rest”, “what about ghillies having a day off?” etc etc, but these are all tosh, and one very much doubts if any objections will be remotely religious! The salmon have no day of rest in England, the English ghillies presumably have Sundays off like everyone else, and the river is fished without them for a day, so what?

That extra day could be an economic lifeline to owners at a time when their incomes have dropped by over 60% in 4 years, and it is plain mad to deprive yourself of 1/7th of your income just because it has “aye been”. And for the working man/woman, well he/she can only fish for salmon for one day of his/her precious weekend in Scotland, on the Saturday, whereas in England they can a make a full weekend of it.

Apart from shooting “game” ( you can legally shoot vermin?) on a Sunday, which would be horribly noisy and rather bloody (so fair enough), is salmon fishing the only other thing you cannot do? In my world, Sunday salmon fishing would be restricted to no boats (because no ghillies), to “fly only” and everything would have to be released, no deaths.

The Scottish Government needs to act to change the law, and the “aye been” brigade confined to the 20th, or even the 19th, century where the “no Sunday fishing for salmon” laws belong.

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The Annual Review of Scottish salmon fisheries for the 2018 season dropped through my letterbox last week, compiled by Fisheries Management Scotland (FMS) which coordinates all Scottish river boards.

Having read it from cover to cover, I was struck by two things.

First, on the hopeful side, how lucky the salmon world is to have so many working hard to save the Atlantic salmon, FMS itself, the Atlantic Salmon Trust, the Salmon and Trout Conservation Trust, the Angling Trust and the Game Conservancy and Wildlife Trust, to name a few. As they coordinate their efforts under the “Missing Salmon Alliance” the hope must be that this new focus will achieve something, both nationally here and internationally amongst all North Atlantic salmon nations, which has not been achieved thus far by the plethora of salmon bodies, both independent and governmental, working more on their own and without a united focus.

Secondly, for the gloom-mongers, the catch reports from the rivers are almost universally depressing and one assumes that the Scottish salmon catch will be one of the lowest ever overall, if not the lowest, since reliable records began. Of course, were it possible to factor out 3 or 4 months of drought and extraordinary heat in 2018, the figures would no doubt be very different, but it would be foolish to take any comfort in that. As Mark Bilsby, CEO of the Atlantic Salmon Trust, says in his report, “since 1985 the number of salmon in the Atlantic has dropped from 8-10 million to less than 3 million, and there are no signs of this decline abating”.

The decline would be greater still if you went back to the 1960s as the base date.

But there is always hope. We understand little about what is going on in the sea, and with so many good and expert folk involved in trying to achieve some salmon population stabilisation and upturn, we have to be optimistic.

Despite the all pervading air of doom, I am.