news/editorial

22 October 2017 News/Editorial

The Tweed catch for last week was 83 salmon and 12 sea trout, making the season’s total, to 21st October 2017, 5,306 salmon and 1,604 sea trout.

With more warm weather to come, and probably more rain, it would be optimistic to predict something very much better for the coming week.

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We are slow to catch on to change, especially when it happens despite us.

And what is happening now to our Tweed salmon is most definitely happening despite us, in that I have yet to meet anyone who thinks the very much reduced autumn runs of the last four years, since 2013, are a good thing.

They are talked about in Armageddon-like terms, except I note by those of us who lived through the dramas of UDN in the late 1960s. We old timers tend to be more sanguine, because UDN was 10 times worse than what is happening now, and like now, we had no idea either if or when it would end.

That sanguinity is too easily mistaken for complacency, which it is not. I do not know an owner who is not worried by recent events, not because any of them think this is the end of salmon fishing as we have known it, but precisely because nobody knows for sure either (a) when it will end or (b) how it will then settle down. And managing the effects of change are never easy.

But I write this in praise of the owners, for, by and large, they are not the “here today and gone tomorrow” types. They are in it for the long haul, short termism an alien and foreign concept.

Those who have not seen this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DjuyMzxpt4

really should take half an hour out to watch it. You will learn about AMOs and the startling correlation between ocean temperatures and salmon/grilse domination.

If you do not watch it, and then continue to blame goosanders, cormorants and seals as the sole cause of what is happening now, and broadcast that to others, it would be a shame, when predation is only a part of a much more complex picture.

Dr Ronald Campbell’s video provides some context, and, more importantly, reasons to hope…...that the future is salmon, not grilse….. and that it has all happened before.

Logically, it must take time for the salmon dominance to gather momentum, because until 2014 the grilse progeny (assuming grilse breed more grilse, which is far from certain) would have heavily outnumbered salmon progeny on the spawning beds and in the feeding streams, where young salmon start their lives.

Only for young salmon born late 2014/early 2015 would they have had the luxury of not competing with vast numbers of grilse progeny, leading, one hopes, to very much higher survival of young salmon, as opposed to young grilse, within the river. Maybe, for this is all conjecture, we will see the results of this in 2018 or 2019, assuming these young salmon will be either 1:2s (1 winter in the river and 2 winters in the sea) or 2:2s.

But even if salmon numbers do increase over time, to replace the lost grilse, we have no idea when they will come back, spring, summer or autumn.

But when they do come back, unlike in the 1910s and 1920s, there will be almost no netting to scoop them up…...a huge compensating factor for rod fishermen, as compared to when this has all happened before.

Optimists would say that a Tweed fishing future of salmon is a much more appealing one than the immediate past’s grilse domination, simply because almost all of us would rather catch a 10lb salmon than a 3 lb grilse.

I really do believe that a bright future is not that far away after four disappointing years.

Just as we never saw the grilse decline coming, nor can we precisely predict when salmon numbers will increase to replace the grilse. But increase they will……..and then, quite suddenly, everyone will think what a good job the River Tweed Commission, the Tweed Foundation and the owners have been doing…...in stark contrast to what many are saying now.

Watch the video, please……

……..and trust that the past will be the best indicator of the future.