21 June 2020 News/Editorial
Nothing is known for sure about how weather and climate affect salmon; after all we cannot ask them. Keen observers over many years will have noted that they do not like just exactly the sort of weather we had last week. Muggy, humid, airless, hot, even, dare I say it, persistent low pressure, they hate it. I know we did not have much more water last week, which did not help, but just look at the scores, they tell a story.
I will bet you that had we had the same water conditions but fresh and breezy from the north west, with cool nights, it would all have been very different.
You can never prove it by re-running last week under those preferred conditions, but I just know what many of us have observed over the years is correct. Of course, you can still catch them and, if after a flood, probably quite a lot, but old stale water and old stale muggy airless weather are a very poor salmon angling combination.
And so it came to pass.
All change early next week. The orientation of the weather is to be southerly and westerly, fresher to start with, less muggy and with some rain, but the rain shadow that is the Tweed valley frustratingly might keep any meaningful quantity of rain far to the west and north. It will become very hot in the south, increasingly here too, and thunderstorms pushing north from the southern heat midweek might be the best chance of any serious rain in the Borders.
We need rain badly or the fishing will continue to fizzle out, other than just above the tide.
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Never one to miss an opportunity to spoil the party ie that there are more fish, I can see two thorny issues looming.
First, amusing if it wasn’t so serious, yon Boris looks like allowing social distancing of one metre, long before oor Nicola does. Logically, as night follows day, boat fishing will be allowed on the English side of the Tweed before it is on the Scottish side. I have measured the distance in a traditional Tweed boat from ghillie to angler and it is exactly one metre. How ridiculous is that? England started fishing 2 ½ weeks before Scotland in May, and now they will be ahead again, just because England and Scotland seem incapable of doing things together. Following everyone breaking the rules last time, I suspect that will happen again. It is absurd beyond reason that those fishing a few yards apart are treated so differently, and some might be inclined to allow boat use at the same time as the English do, or, of course, the English could agree to forego boat use until their Scottish neighbours over the river can join in? Now there’s an unlikely thought.
Secondly, the touchy subject of weed cutting. In olden times when nobody fished, or if they did very intermittently, in high summer, it was agreed that weed cutting should happen in the last two weeks of July. Some beats need to cut weed, by no means all, but some most definitely do to allow successful fishing in certain pools. But if they cut weed in late July, now one of the best times to fish and when many/most beats are fully let, surely you cannot cut weed and ruin the fishing downstream? There was aggro last year, and unless agreement is reached, with more fish in the river there could be even more aggro this year. It is not my purpose to try to come up with an answer here, but you would think that late Saturday and Sunday cutting only has to be part of it, but there are all sorts of possible issues with that “solution” too.
However, doing nothing and leaving us with weed cutting “rules” going back to the 1980s and 1990s, when the timing of salmon runs were very different, cannot be sensible.
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Because there have been a few fish and yours truly has been acting ghillie, so I have been mentally dishing out points for fish caught. Level of difficulty is the deciding factor.
The standard of angling has been mind bogglingly high. I am in awe of the skill and general fishing know-how of the locals (for that they have to be, or at least staying locally!). We have had Graham, Sean, Selwyn, Alex, Finn, Jasper, Jonathans (x2!), Steve, John, Nick, Alan, Mike, Kevin, David, Charles, they have all been superb, all wading away, no boats and pretty much all looking after themselves after some initial guidance and general faffing about from the sadly superannuated ghillie.
I have enjoyed every minute. They have all been staggeringly competent, and whereas I thought I knew a thing or two about it, I now know for sure that I do not. I suppose we have to award prizes, and I am torn between Sean, Graham, Selwyn, Nick and one of the Jonathans; I would happily engage any of them if they had to catch a fish to save my life; which is not to denigrate the others, they have all been brilliant and the standard astonishingly high. All expert fly fishers. To a man they winced, without any prompting from their ghillie, at the occasional projectiles being launched from the opposite bank.
Were it not for an exceptional bit of fishing in the most testing of conditions, the prize would go to Selwyn, who made no friends by three times catching many salmon in a pool after it had been flogged for hours by others, and countless other rises and follows, a true master of the Sunray Shadow; we traditional (small fly) fishers would have caught, and did catch, none of them.
But maximum points must go to someone who waded into the Temple Pool last Monday, no current, glassy calm, and any onlooker would have wondered what on earth that idiot was doing. But he caught a beautiful 8lb cock fish on a number 12 Cascade, gently handlining all the way, the hook just lodged in the very last point of the nose of the fish. On seeing just where the hook was, the poor fish was dragged onto the side (still in the water of course) quicker than you can say Ena Sharples.
As that reference to the redoubtable Ena will tell you, he was an old bloke, a bit set in his ways. It was, of course, yours truly. Maximum points, as any impartial adjudicator would readily agree. Points, of course, mean prizes, if sadly still no tips!
But seriously, the main experience of the last few weeks has been the joy of watching expert fly fishermen at work. It has been both humbling and the greatest pleasure. They have, every one of them, been a sensational advertisement for the gentle and noble art. I will really miss being a (very) intermittent ghillie to them all, for my time is up on the 29th when the two professionals return to do the job properly. It will be great to have them back, with much gratitude to both for sitting it out so patiently and uncomplainingly.
Now what am I going to do?
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Those who witnessed the massive smolt run of 2018 may not be too surprised at the numbers of fish here in 2020. But it is odd that they have appeared as salmon (ie 2SW) in such numbers and in May and June, because that means that many of them (if they are 2:2s as per the traditional majority of Tweed springers) emerged from the 2015/16 spawning round, and so survived as eggs the huge and persistent (storm Desmond et al) floods around Christmas and New Year, after which fry counts were far from encouraging.
Or maybe many of these fish are 1:2s? So mild are our winters now, that smolting takes place in large numbers after just one year. So are they a mixture of 2:2s and 1:2s, a source of strength of course, because we are then not reliant on just one age class? The Ettrick was comparatively unaffected by those floods; see this months edition of The River here https://www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-River-Issue-June-2020.pdf. It is still a stretch to think that all these extra fish could have resulted from that 2015/16 (flooded) age class, when the Ettrick for years has produced many fewer adults than we are seeing now, without the clear negative effects of those big floods.
I hear the Spey also has large numbers of fish, but not the Dee or the Tay, which were both exceptionally affected by those same 2015/16 floods.
Other theories, including the ever present one about trawlers, or lack of them, abound.
As ever, most, if not all, will be wrong.
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