news/editorial

24 June 2018 News/Editorial

The more curmudgeonly amongst you, whilst greeting the biggest rise in water last week since April, will groan at the promise of almost unbroken sunshine and increasing heat for at least a week to come.

We fishermen are hard to please.

The signs are getting better for more fish, although the catch numbers alone last week do not tell it all, as the best part of two days below Kelso were lost to the rising, then very dirty, river.

The total catch for last week was 122 salmon and 40 sea trout making the season’s total 940 salmon and 183 sea trout to 23rd June 2018.

The lark and the owl may be best placed for success in the days to come, given our weather forecasters confident, if in angling terms unwelcome, predictions.

Time for the Factor 30; this year, so far, we are having a proper summer.

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Without succumbing to undue anthropomorphism, I fear the battle for sensitive, empathetic practices when releasing salmon is lost, thanks to that ubiquitous scourge of modern life, the mobile phone.

When everywhere there are pictures of fish well out of the water, halfway up a bank or wherever else, most not being in or even very close to any water, you know that the game is up.

I imagine every river has in its (largely ignored) codes of practice for releasing fish (a) to handle them as little as possible, (b) not to remove them from the water at all, if possible, and (c) if removed from the water, for whatever reason, to do so only momentarily, whilst preferably standing/kneeling in the water yourself to facilitate and speed up the fish’s submergence into a medium in which it will no longer suffer.

Of course, there are complications when fishing from a boat (how can you unhook it without bringing the netted fish aboard?) or even with long gravel shallows with minimal depth of water when the fish will come, at least partially, out of the water before you can control it to unhook it….and maybe you would allow someone’s first ever salmon to be pictured, for a mille-second only, without being submerged?

But most of those pictures seem to be gratuitously ignorant of the damaging effects, on live salmon, of prolonged exposure to air, especially when you want those salmon to not just survive, but spawn successfully up to 6 months later.

After all, that is the whole point of releasing them.

Next time you take a salmon out of the water to picture it, think of it as you having your head shoved under water for the same amount of time that you keep the salmon in the air.

You would be gasping for air when finally your head is allowed up out of the water, and you would be distinctly unhappy, or stressed, or anxious…..or indeed all of the above.

So it is with those photographed, still to be released, fish.

But the game is up, we humans, it seems, would rather the all too transient glory of displaying our capture on celluloid, or the modern day equivalents, Instagram et al, so that it can be published somewhere for all to see.…..

…..rather than empathise with our noble and blameless quarry, drowning in oxygen.

I have been banging this drum long enough.

Too few are listening to its beat.