news/editorial

23 July 2017 News/Editorial

Many years ago, yours truly and Jeremy Read, then assistant director of the Atlantic Salmon Trust, went to Iceland to see Orri Vigfusson. The reason….something about a white fish quota traded with the Greenlanders to stop them fishing for salmon. I forget the details….it was complicated.

We went at the end of May, idiotically two or three days before the salmon fishing season begins. Orri drove us round in his 4x4 with covered seats….sealskin. “The only good seal is a dead seal” he said, in the uncomplicated, unemotional manner of those who have depended on fish for their survival, as Icelanders have, and how they talk about other creatures who compete for their fish.

I took him 2 bottles of a special blended whisky as a present; he loved it and every time after that, I made sure to bring him another bottle.

After dinner, still almost daylight of course, instead of going back to our hotel, he flew us around the south of Iceland in a plane with an engine smaller than my mowing machine, up his favourite river, over a volcano and down a glacier. I managed to disguise my terror at all this, always happier being carried aloft by four Boeing 747 engines.

I mention all this because, very sadly, Orri has died, aged just 74. Nobody did more to save the Atlantic salmon than Orri, he devoted his whole life to it, and was remarkably successful. He talked about restoring the “abundance” of Atlantic salmon, a very different concept to simply retaining enough salmon to spawn and keep salmon runs going. He meant “angling abundance”, very conscious that we anglers only catch between 1 in 3 salmon (in the spring) and 1 in 20 (in the autumn) of the fish which come into the river, so that you need salmon “in abundance” to keep anglers happy.

No friend of any form of netting wild salmon, he always insisted on treating netsmen fairly, either by providing generous compensation, or alternative means of earning a living, or both.

As many others have said since the sad news broke, the next time you catch a salmon, take a moment to consider and give thanks…..

…….for without Orri, you might well never have caught it.

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Speaking of which, I got one last night, all 12 lbs or so of it, after spending last week in Wales. I went out to have a few casts in a calm, post-rain evening, to wind down after a long drive.

It was one of the most beautiful fish you will ever see. Not especially large, nor sea liced, though close, but the most wonderful shape, almost square it was so fat. It was a hen, a carrier of so many 1,000s of eggs, I am not sure anyone should be killing fish like that.

The no. 10 Cascade slipped from its mouth without causing any damage at all, and back she went, swimming calmly back into the stream.

I worry that too many of these July fish are being killed, the brakes having come off at the end of June. My preference is to kill grilse, preferably cock grilse, under 6lbs, and to leave all the big spawners well alone.

But maybe there will be no grilse, or at least many fewer than there used to be.

So what then can we kill, especially if the autumn run is now not what it was?

You may become like me, for I have not killed a salmon since 2013. It gives me no pleasure to see one in my freezer.

The joy is in catching it, and then in the thought that, after release, it will spawn and provide many more salmon for others to catch in the future.

That is more than enough for me.

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And another thing.

Why does nobody say in what wonderful condition all these July fish are?

At the first sight of just one skinny grilse, the alarmists will have the salmon world coming to an end, for lack of food in the sea.

I always rather took to Dr Ronald Campbell’s remarkable equanimity about those skinny grilse of past years. He told me that if they had been even skinnier and all died at sea, we would never have seen them at all, and, as a consequence, we would also never have worried about what caused them to be so thin.

He was, of course, right.

We should rejoice at the wonderful condition of the majority of our salmon, and not obsess about a few skinny ones.