news/editorial

25 November 2018 News/Editorial

It is hardly worth bothering with the salmon catch for last week, but for the sake of good order, here it is; 30 salmon and 5 sea trout, bringing the running score to 24th November 2018 up to

5,479 salmon and 703 sea trout, within 90% accuracy.

But if the piscatorial news is depressingly familiar, at least our Common (Eurasian) Crane is still enjoying itself on the Lees haugh. Here for 3 weeks now and befriended by two herons, it is an immature Crane, this year’s offspring, which must have taken a wrong turning on its migration route.

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After 6 years of doing this, and finding something interesting (?) to say on matters fishy for each of 43 out of the 52 weeks every year, my mind turns, unsurprisingly, to not doing it any more.

That there is a communications gap between those who run this great river Tweed, and those who fish on it and provide the money, is unarguable.

That gap is inbuilt into the system, in that the proprietors are commercial operators, for the most part, who run their fisheries wholly independently of the RTC and the Tweed Foundation; after all the proprietors have employees (boatmen/ghillies) and paying tenants who have no contract whatever with the RTC and TF.

And the RTC and Tweed Foundation have not historically seen it as part of their business to communicate with the customers of these independent salmon fishery owners. When times were good, there was no need, it was a sellers’ market.

Into this communications gap someone has to step because almost all of the current ill feeling about the RTC and TF, from anglers and boatmen, is born only of the lack of effective ongoing communication with the people who pay the bills, the Tweed’s paying anglers, and those who work on the river, the boatmen/ghillies.

Not everyone agrees either that there is a gap or, as necessarily follows, that it needs filling. They would let things go on as they are, regardless of the reputational damage done to the RTC and TF by the failure to adequately communicate and explain to those who work and fish on the river the truly excellent work they do, and have always done.

This weekly column has a surprisingly large readership, if our Tweedbeats diagnostics information is to be believed, indicating, if nothing else, that there is a demand for regular dissemination and discussion of salmon fishing related information and news.

Nothing would be more pleasing than that the communications gap is filled by those far better qualified to fill it, and then this column can depart the scene and leave your (and my) Sunday evenings clear for the Results Show of "Strictly...".

But we, or rather the RTC and TF, are not there yet.

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In a few months time, by April 2019, I will have been fishing for salmon on the Tweed for 60 years. Experience is often either underrated, or not rated at all. Long in the tooth maybe, but folk like me have seen a lot of it, if not all of it, before.

Which is why we tend be less worried than some younger, shriller voices.

The period 1967-1976 was a bad time for Tweed fishing. I was there.

We can remember....or at least our fishing records help to remind us.

There was UDN in 1967, which continued to a lesser extent for many years after that, coterminous with the cyclical switch from spring dominated (pre 1960s) to late summer and autumn (post 1970s) dominated salmon and grilse runs, which lasted for nearly 50 years.

Upper Floors caught just 78 salmon in 1973, Lower Floors 55 in 1973, and the Junction 248 in 1976.

Compare those catches to this (2018) year: Upper Floors 76, Lower Floors 58, and the Junction 216.

And the river rod catch 1967-1976 never got above 6,000 (mainly around 4,000); for the last four years 2014-2017 it has been around 6,000-7,000.

It all sounds very familiar, or at least it is to those of us who were there, and fishing, 50 years ago. My fishing book entry for May 18th 1974 says “Spring run almost non existent”, something you could well say about the numbers of fresh fish post October this year.

And yet... in 1981 Upper Floors caught 502 salmon, and 669 in 1983.

It can change very quickly. Those who, here in 2018, believe salmon runs to be in terminal decline, would have been saying exactly the same things as they are saying now, had they been with us 50 years ago.

They would have been wrong.