news/editorial

23 June 2019 News/Editorial

Tweed’s rod catch for last week was mildly disappointing, if by no means bad, at 151 salmon and 96 sea trout, taking a dip from the previous week for no very obvious reason, other than perhaps a lack of fresh fish coming in from the sea. This was evidenced by the poor catches of the lowest beats, despite good tides and enough water in the river. We can only hope it was a short blip and that normal service will be resumed soonest.

This brings the totals for the season to date to 1,518 salmon and 377 sea trout. To the same date in 2018, the figures were 940 salmon and 183 sea trout.

As for next week, when surveying the various weather forecasts for later tonight and Monday, I cannot help rewinding in my mind the sight of ITV’s charming Irish tipster sheltering under his umbrella at Royal Ascot last week, clutching his microphone as he read out the bookies’ latest prices for the 4.20, the big race, and finishing with the words, in his delightful Irish brogue, ”It’s tipping it down here at Royal Ascot, it’s biblical, it’s truly biblical !!”

And so it was, and so it could be here over the next 24 hours, if the forecasters are even half right. Heaven alone knows what that will do to the river.

Very brown and very big could be the least of it, and after that, for a few days at least, it is supposed to become very much warmer.

Summer, or something like it, could be just around the (very soggy) corner.

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“How does spring 2019 compare to the averages?” I hear you ask, as we near the end of Tweed’s piscatorial spring season (30th June). It is not that we think spring goes on for an extra month in these parts, just that we know that Tweed’s springers keep coming in at least until mid-June, so that most of the salmon caught by the rods in June are technically springers, albeit with a smattering of summer fish/grilse towards the end of the month.

From the total above so far, within 90% accuracy and with a week to go, let us assume that the final tally is around 1,700 salmon. A whole lot better than 2018 (1,083) but maybe not quite up to the previous 5 year average of 1,860, or indeed the long term average since the 1970s (when the Tweed stopped being a predominantly spring river) of 1,945, but not far from either.

This is encouraging after the various horrors of 2018, and it certainly improves everyone’s general outlook to be reporting good news as opposed to the now customary doom and gloom.

With November not much of a contributor to the tally nowadays, the next four months of July, August, September and October should be the big scorers.

With water and not too much heat, a good July could produce around 800 or 900 salmon, with the following 3 months all going well over the 1,000 mark. Pre 2014 these figures would have been nothing to write home about, but they still represent a lot of fish.

We can only hope something like it actually happens.

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We had a Great Crested Grebe here briefly this week, a most beautiful bird in its summer plumage, especially its stunning long and thin white neck. Not as rare as the two Great White Egrets and the Eurasian Crane which were with us all winter, but even more striking to look at.

What with kingfishers, a large population of reed buntings, skylarks, swooping swifts, swallows, sand martins and sandpipers, two families of pink footed (I think not greylag?) geese (with 5 and 6 goslings respectively), oystercatchers, tree creepers, flycatchers, nuthatches, every sort of wagtail, to name but a few, we have become a twitcher’s paradise.

And then in the calm of last Friday evening, the glassy smoothness of the Temple Pool was pockmarked with the little rings of migrating smolts, at the end of June. “Surely not smolts migrating as late as midsummer’s day?” I hear you say.

Well yes actually, some of them were leaping for fun out of the water; they were smolts and lots of them. A late party, no doubt, and by Saturday evening they had all gone seaward.

There is hope, for the future.