news/editorial

21 September 2014 News/Editorial

Two weeks ago I wrote of the 3 options as to the paucity of salmon and grilse so far this autumn.

These were:

1. Environmental disaster at sea for the smolt product of 2010;

2. The grilse are late;

3. The grilse which should have come back this year, the progeny of that massive run of 2010, are going to come back as salmon next year.

I had already discounted the unhelpful water and weather conditions of this tiresomely prolonged Indian summer on the grounds that it was not too dissimilar in 2003 and 2010, and the beats below Coldstream caught shedloads of fish in those years, pathetically little this year viz Tillmouth 441 in September 2010, and just 59 this September with a week to go; Pedwell 96 in 2010, and 18 so far this month; Horncliffe 226 in 2010, and 33 this month…… and so on.

The almost incontrovertible conclusion…...that the grilse are not going to come back in anything like normal numbers.

This is so on almost all other Scottish rivers viz that wonderful beat Lethen on the Findhorn; they caught 553 in season 2010 and just 175 so far this year with only a week to go to the end of their season.

Of the other big rivers, the Spey, Dee and Tay are all like us….way down in numbers.

So we can now pretty much dismiss option 2 (above) that the grilse are late.

We have to face the uncomfortable truth….. that they are not coming in anything like anticipated numbers….which with 2 months of our season to go is not to say that we cannot still have some very good fishing….but the numbers at the end of the year are going to be way down, especially if we lose the normal 1 or 2 weeks to floods as we get into stormier times in late October/November.

Logic tells us not to panic; all Scottish rivers had good or even near record catches in 2010, and it is hard to believe the progeny of those massive numbers have simply disappeared without trace in some cataclysm at sea.

We can also discount any in-river disasters for the 2010 spawning; 2010/2011 winter, although very snowy, was not in fact that cold and there were no really massive catchment wide floods as a result of the snow melt. In addition our fry monitoring since 2010 has indicated abundant salmon fry in almost all our spawning tributaries.

But of course it is both distressing (especially for tenants who have been coming for years and suddenly find very few fish) and concerning…. because we simply do not know why this is happening.

We are in the hands of nature.

It could be a blip and normal service will resume next year; or, it could be symptomatic of a general decline in numbers which might last a few years; or, it could be that the grilse cycle of the last few decades is ending and that both spring and (big) autumn salmon will predominate for the next few decades, just as they did from the 1920s to the 1960s.

For the latter, all the grilse have to do is to decide to stay in the sea one more winter before returning.

I have always been convinced that is what happened here on the Tweed from the 1920s-1960s, because our springers were so small, averaging 7 lbs (what you would expect a 3, 4 or 5lb grilse to have grown to by staying in the sea for another 6 months) and anything over 15 lbs was almost unheard of, until the autumn, when the fish were fewer, but very big.

It could be that, and not just in matters constitutional, we are all in for change.