24 May 2020 News/Editorial
With apologies for the confusion about when Scotland's fishing might start again, it now looks like Friday 29 May NOT Thursday 28 May. See the latest from the RTC https://www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/?p=6713
Please note the word "likely" and that further guidance may/will be issued this week.
In case things change again, please keep watching the media news bulletins and any further updates on the rivertweed.org.uk/news pages.
With plenty of fish being caught (in England) at both the beginning and end of the week, with the heat and humidity making things more tricky midweek, there are clearly plenty of fish about, around and below Coldstream at least.
We will only find out how many fish there are above Coldstream when Scotland is allowed to fish again from Thursday (see more on this below). Only then, for the first time since 24th March, will we have the whole river back in business, the English beats having had 14 days fishing, for evermore denied to those who would like to have fished opposite and above.
Of course I am compromised, but it has been a frustrating time for all of us, English and Scottish, but the frustrations multiply when the person on the other side is fishing when you cannot. For the most part I am sure the English side has understood this and have behaved sensitively, so as not to “rub the other side’s noses in it”. That there have been a few notable exceptions might take a little while to forget.
But that we here in the Tweed fishing world are both English and Scottish can once again be forgotten, from Thursday. We are back where we should be, united as one.
Let’s hope for evermore.
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As for next week, after a stormy weekend, with water levels rising a little as I write, the forecast is for things to settle down throughout next week with increasing warmth. You would think that the chances will be best early on, becoming more difficult later when things heat up.
I can only repeat what was said last week, that amidst all the gloom, the best news of all is that there are both substantial numbers of adult salmon in the lower river, which there never were last year, and thousands of travelling smolts.
Having caught 9,000 in the Gala trap up to the end of the previous week, biologist James Hunt assumed that there had been so many that, as it was getting late in May, that would be it for the 2020 Gala smolt run. Not a bit of it, another 4,000 were caught in the trap last week, bringing the total caught to 13,000. If this represents (say) 40% of the total run, then over 30,000 smolts will have come out of the Gala Water, just one of Tweed’s numerous and prolific tributaries. It is very easily a record for all the years that smolts have been trapped at the Gala Skinworks cauld.
Good news indeed.
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More excellent news, some would say overdue, I could not possibly comment. We will have fishing on the whole of the Tweed, not just the English bit, from 28th May.
Amid all the complications and contradictions of having different rules for social distancing and travel restrictions, depending on whether you are on one side of Coldstream bridge or the other, those both living here and thinking of coming here to fish can be forgiven for being confused. Not only are the rules themselves different, especially the timing of when they will come in and go out, but they are far from easy to interpret.
In country areas such as this where a mile is nothing, to have “local” travel, all that is permitted for leisure, including fishing, restricted to “no more than 5 miles”, has come in for particular criticism. It is way over my paygrade to comment on how wise a restriction this is, when there is much evidence that it is being ignored before it even comes in. And how does it work when you travel from one side of the border to the other? Do you ditch one set of rules and take up another when you get halfway across the bridge?
The RTC has issued an excellent Protocol/set of rules as to how beats can safely operate. It is based on Fisheries Management Scotland’s generic pro forma and adapted specifically for the Tweed. Here it is https://www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/?p=6698
The key points are that neither huts nor boats should be used under current social distancing measures.
The unspoken complications surround both travel and accommodation. With Scots only permitted to travel fewer than 5 miles and with the English not allowed to stay overnight here when coming from afar (not that there is anywhere to stay as all hotels, pubs, b&bs etc are shut), if the letter of the rules and regulations are adhered to, remarkably few people will be able to fish here.
As a result, one suspects that, as was the case when England was first allowed to fish ten days ago, most of the travel rules will be broken, because after over nine weeks, people are determined to fish. Many of us never really understood why jogging, walking, and cycling in a crowded park in town was always allowed when angling (the most solitary of sports), especially by Tweed anglers standing on their own in the middle of the river, was verboten.
Letting activity will only really begin here when those coming from afar are allowed to both travel and stay. The present English plan is that that will happen from 4th July, in Scotland some time later, which raises the real possibility of fishers coming here to stay in an English pub or b&b from 4th July, but fishing on a Scottish (or English) Tweed beat (of course, not travelling more than 5 miles within Scotland to do so!)
In our admittedly tiny and unimportant, to our politicians at least, world here on the border, what a relief it will be if at some distant date in this horrible coronavirus saga our two countries, Scotland and England, can do things in harmony in every respect.
Amen to that.
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And finally, perhaps most importantly, what are these fish? I have been here for 40 years and cannot recall quite so many May fish being in the river. Is it the start of the much heralded, but thus far absent, new spring run, to replace the autumn run that has dwindled to such low numbers over the last 5 years? Is it just the start of what happened in the 1920s and went on until the mid 1960s?
Clutching at straws, maybe, but when all you have is straws to clutch at, we might as well clutch away. Cutching can be good for you.
Or as one correspondent put it on Radio 4 this morning, reference this ghastly bug, “if there is one thing more infectious than fear, it is hope”.
The numbers of fish this May have given us just that.
Hope.
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