news/editorial

22 April 2018 News/Editorial

Will we have a whole week this spring undisturbed by rising, dirty water levels?

Last week, we correctly issued concerns about rain on Sunday (it did, levels went up 6 inches on Monday) and Tuesday (again it did, levels going up 1 1/2 feet on Wednesday, and very dirty), despite a stellar forecast about how settled and warm it was going to be, “spring is sprung at last”..”there will be the warmest days since August” etc etc etc.

Partly as a result, last week’s catch was a rather desultory 47 salmon and 2 sea trout, making 310 salmon and 32 sea trout for the season to 21st April 2018.

The week ahead?

Could we have 6 days of steadily dropping water levels?

“Unsettled” is the prognosis, cooler and showery, so you wouldn’t bet on it, even if the north and west will get most of the rain.

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After getting on for 40 years involvement with the Tweed management, I am really worried.

The persistence of bad fishing news since the start of 2014 has (finally) got to me. Probably too late, but unwarranted optimism is a necessary concomitant of salmon fishing.

2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 have all been bad years, and now, coming towards the end of April, we are having one of the worst starts to the spring, ever, in 2018.

It is all very concerning.

I have a profound sense of failure, of letting the river I love down, that after all that has been done, all the money spent over those 40 years, all the time and commitment of so many dedicated people…….that numbers of salmon coming up the Tweed are now lower than they have ever been in those 40 years, and, for all we know, for the 400 years before that.

40 years ago there were 30 Tweed river and coastal nets and 120 North East drift netters; now there are virtually none of either.

40 years ago anglers killed everything they caught ; now less than 1 in 5 salmon caught is killed.

40 years ago there were obstructions on most Tweed tributaries stopping salmon getting to many 100s of miles of good spawning; now, bar a few immoveable natural obstructions, salmon can access more miles of prime spawning territory than at any time since the industrial revolution started and, because before that fishery owners simply used to block rivers and streams to trap salmon, for many 100s of years before that.

40 years ago the Tweed Foundation had not been thought of, and money spent on Tweed fishery management research was zero. Now we have three excellent scientists dedicated to the job of keeping our fish safe and to maximising the numbers of juveniles produced by what is one of the most extensive, diverse and best spawning systems (representing some 15% of the whole spawning area of Scotland) you could imagine. £millions have been spent by the Foundation on monitoring and research, crucially including habitat improvement, since it came into being in the early 1980s.

40 years ago there was high seas netting of massive proportions, not just off the Faroes and Greenland, but elsewhere in the largely (then) unpoliced North Atlantic. Now the Faroese and Greenlanders are subsistence netters only and there is no predation by humans on the high seas that anyone has ever (reliably) heard of.

40 years ago poaching was rife; now there is almost none.

And yet, and yet….

…….here are our Lees catches for the last 6 fishing months (September 2017 to April 2018), with 4 rods fishing almost every day.

In brackets alongside, I have shown the 5 year averages for those same months for our catches here up to the end of 2013:

Sept 2017 47 (196)

Oct 2017 74 (227)

Nov 2017 14 (133)

Feb 2018 1 (11)

March 2018 0 (16)

April 2018 1 (19)

For context, both our 2017, and 2013 5 year averages, September to November catches were the highest for any beat on the river.

Now, of course, we can all produce figures to suit our particular argument, and what is shown above does give two extremes, viz 2013 was the highest 5 year average we have had here since records began, and the autumn of 2017 and spring of 2018 have been the worst autumn and spring we have had for the last 40 years…….but even so, the speed and extent of the decline has been astonishing.

More worryingly... well used by now to the recent autumn and grilse decline... is something now happening to the spring, especially the early spring, because both 2017 and 2018 catches up to the end of April have been, if never strong of late, concerningly weaker than before?

Tweed’s salmon management, the subject of much ill-judged and unjust criticism, is exactly the same as it was in those record years up to 2013, and those who blame it all on birds do so in the face of counts which show little change in the numbers of goosanders now, as compared to the last 20 years, even if there are more cormorants.

Logically, something very dramatic has happened in the sea so that salmon survival, most likely survival of our smolts once they get to sea, has plummeted since 2013.

Efforts via tracking are now being made to find out what is happening, but, even if successful, will we be able to do anything about it?

Somehow I keep coming back, in my fevered mind, to the talk given last year by Professor Jens Christian Holst, in which he explained the biblical extent of the expansion of the mackerel population in the circle between the Faroes, Iceland, Norway and the UK…...just where our grilse (used to) come from, and now where all our Scottish young salmon face insuperable competition from countless millions, even billions, of mackerel.

His prognosis (in 2017) was gloomy, along the lines of, “things could get a lot worse before they get better”, the “better” presumably only happening when the mackerel boom somehow corrects itself.

After the last 3 months of 2017 and the first 3 months of 2018, his warnings are looking depressingly apt.

We can only pray that future events will, very shortly, prove both his warnings, and my profound sense of failure over the last 40 years, to be misplaced.