25 April 2021 News/Editorial
Little to report on the fishing front, more of the same, with a few fish but not many. As expected, for lack of water, of the 50 or so caught last week, a handful only were caught above Kelso.
We are getting used to the sun beating down from an azure sky. The relentless sunshine last year was similar, but thanks to Covid we have no similar reference point for fish numbers in April 2020, because there was no fishing.
Anecdotally there were more fish, but we do not know for sure when they started coming in, in numbers. We do know that when the English side started fishing in mid May 2020, one rod at Tillmouth caught 16 salmon in a day in only two or three of their myriad pools, and they ended with 85 in total for the last 2 weeks of May. As we survey the scene, here in the last week of April a year later, those sort of numbers seem far distant.
I hear from the tidal reaches, where at these low water levels you can see the Vs of the salmon running in over the shallows, that there is no sign of any weight of fish. Very high spring tides over the next 5 or 6 days, and with the river so low, that is when any salmon off the coast might come in.
If so, fish numbers in the river can increase rapidly, especially, without rain, for the beats below Kelso.
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In the sure knowledge that it will never rain meaningfully again (see below), you do wonder why we salmon fishers bother? River too low, too high, wind too strong, the sun too bright, the water coloured or too hot, the fish either there or not there, the fish there but they won’t take, even when they take, they take short or fall off just as you are about to land them, they don’t want to eat your fly anyway, so why do they take it, ever?
Why on earth do we continue, for the chances of success are vanishingly small? The triumph of hope over experience hardly does it justice.
Do the facts bear that out?
As an accountant (ex) you would expect me to quantify it, or try to. In historical terms we treat a catch of 500 here as good (best over 900, worst around 230, over the last 40 years). At 4 rods a day for say 8 months (I exclude parts of February, March and November which are harder to let), that is say 830 rod/days, so you will catch a salmon on 50-60% of the days you are here. Now, of course, it ain’t that simple, because it is lumpy. Some ne'er do well, who we all hate, will catch 12 one day, and bang on about it, and those round about get it wrong, conditions hopeless and they are all doomed to blank days. One thing salmon fishing isn’t is fair.
But in a way that is the whole point, uncertainty rules and that is why we love it. We know that the odds are against us, even if 50-60% doesn’t look too bad, we know that the variables queueing up to deny us success are legion. Curiously, that is exactly why we do it.
If you will forgive exposing something of my incredibly spoiled and fortunate past, I have caught many salmon in a day more times than I care to count. Perhaps old age, but now when I catch 3, that is about enough. For some reason, I recall fishing the tail of the Cauld Stream one early evening in late August some years ago, still 2 hours until dark, and I had already caught 13. It suddenly came to me that it was no longer fun. I gave up and came home. There was no surprise when another salmon took my fly, and I was putting them back anyway, so why go on? Somehow the essential uncertainty had been lost. Now I will give up when I get to 5 or 6. My book tells me that the last time my daily catch exceeded 5 was in 2011, ten years ago.
Perhaps, at long last, maturity has arrived, and the knowledge that the mystery, the uncertainty, the challenge and difficulty are everything. Once they go, why carry on? The words of an unpleasantly spoiled long time fisherman, someone who can do it whenever he wants, you will say.
You would be correct.
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Weather geeks will be interested to know that in December to February inc. we had 12.5 inches of rain here, pretty much half our annual rainfall in 3 months. March was dryish at less than 1 inch, and now April is resembling the Atacama Desert on a good day (Ed’s note, some parts of the Atacama have never had any rain, ever, and the wettest average elsewhere in the AD is 1mm/ year).
What of the future? The weather gurus predict no proper, river rising rain at least until after 8th May, and even then there are dark mutterings of the high pressure persisting, if mutterings of the less confident variety. My farming friends are beginning to twitch, some warm and wet, as opposed to dry and cold, would suit their crops down to the ground, and sooner rather than later.
Sunshine is good for all of us after a long winter of deep gloom and lockdown, especially as the beaches of Marbella, Ayia Napa, Fuengirola and Benidorm, my “go to” holiday locations, are not immediately accessible.
But we anglers, and my farming mates, couldn’t half do with some rain in May, and after all this April drought and sun, some more of the wet stuff in June, July, August and September, a day’s rain every 10 days or so, with some sun and not too warm in between, would be just fine.
“Good” summers are so yesterday. Just look at 2018, for what that did to the fishing.
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As the sun beams down and the 2021 cricket season gets under way, there is an excellent book you must read/dip into called “Berkmann’s Cricketing Miscellany”.
In 1969 or 1970, it matters not which, I was playing against Malvern in the Cricketer Cup, at Malvern, with Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie our captain. Bowling at Roger Tolchard (one of many such Malvernian first class cricketing Tolchards), he picked up a good length ball, just outside off stump, and hit it so far over and down the hill at Malvern that the ball was never seen again. My captain strolled over, put his hand on my shoulder and said in the gentlest, nicest way, that if we didn’t want to run out of cricket balls, I might consider bowling something different. You cricketers will know that whereas a good length ball, on or outside off stump, in a 2, 3 or 4 day game, is the business, that “corridor of uncertainty” for the batsman, but in one day cricket, it gives said batsman just the amount of bounce and leverage he needs to smash it into the middle of next week (or, in this case, well down Malvern hill). “Try some yorkers”, said the skipper, which I did and escaped the rest of the over comparatively unscathed.
Berkmann’s book tells us that when Hampshire won the Championship under Colin’s brilliant leadership, his only rule was that “my players have to be in bed before breakfast”, and when asked what he thought about golf, he replied that “it was something you played between cricket and death”.
A great captain. In today’s appalling jargon “a people person”, everyone liked him and he knew instinctively how to get the best out of every player in his team. There is much more of the same, and better, in Berkmann’s book.
If you like cricket.
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