26 May 2019 News/Editorial
Please forgive the early posting of this weekly dirge, but I am by way of being south to view (and coo at) the latest addition to the clan, Henry Joseph, and to welcome him into this world. As coo-ers go, I am, like most men, not a very good one, but intend to mix the (very) intermittent coo with asking young Henry for his advice on completing the Times crossword. I like to think he will be rather good at it.
I am guessing at the Tweed scores for last week, because of this early posting, but it looks to be something like 110 salmon and 15 sea trout, good, even very good, catches considering the less than promising conditions which persist, especially the minimal water levels.
Yet, you can hardly credit it, friends on the Spey have been plagued by rain, cool weather and consequent mini-floods for most of last week, whereas we cannot buy rain at any price.
As for next week, the weather prognosis is that we are finally done with those easterlies that have dominated, as they always do, most of April and May, and the North Atlantic jet stream is getting its act together and will produce both westerlies and more unsettled weather for the next week or two.
Unsettled enough to get some proper wet stuff for the gardens of the Buddhist monks at Eskdalemuir, and into the top of Teviot,Tweed and Ettrick?
Maybe.
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What is so different about springers is their single minded determination to progress upstream. But why?
If we had these persistent low water conditions in the late summer, all beats east of Coldstream would be cleaning up, because those grilse and summer salmon hang around, often well into October. Counterintuitive, you would think, as the the later fish should want to hurry up, whereas the springers have until October to make their way into the Ettrick headwaters. Yet ‘tis t’other way around, the springers are in a rush, whereas the later fish seem very relaxed about it all. The remarkable thing about this year is how you can follow, thanks to the internet, the pockets of fish as they move upstream, by the catches. Lower beats catch 3, 4 or 5 one day, nothing the next, yet the beat 5 miles upstream suddenly catches 4 or 5, having caught nothing the two days before. Those springers are going to go on up, despite the minimally low water levels. Nothing, but nothing, will stop them.
The netsmen used to report the same thing; springers are much harder to catch, because they go straight through like bullets, no messing about.
It has always been so, sometimes much more extreme than this year. #
In 1954, at the peak of the last period of spring dominated runs, huge numbers missed out all the prime beats so that by May the beats above Galashiels, the Yair, Thornielee and the Nest had better spring fishing than they had ever had before, and the majority of the fish were fresh, not river fish. GPR Balfour-Kinnear in his book “Catching Salmon and Sea Trout” could find no convincing logical explanation, and it certainly was not lack of kelts (as decoys) in the lower beats.
Perhaps no more need be said. Springers are both magnificent fish, the cream of all salmon, and a mystery.
But we still have some, and they are an unique feature of Scottish east and north coast rivers as compared to all others in the North Atlantic, both here and abroad. Nobody else has them, either at all, or certainly not in the numbers we do. They are precious, which is why we rod fishers need to go on looking after them. Just as well as we do now.
As for netting, one imagines that this low water has played into the hands of the only one remaining on the Tweed, Gardo. They will no doubt have killed a number of our springers in 2019. But neither they, nor anyone else, will be doing any killing in 2020 until after 31st May. The rods, of course, kill nothing until after 30th June, and even then very little.
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Not the least of the consequences of this low water is that, far from easily accommodating (say) 3 or 4 rods on a salmon beat’s, for example, mile long of double bank, the actual fishable water is reduced to about 500 yards, being a series of 50 to 100 yards strips at the very necks of the pools.
Some of the most productive pools have been unfishable for weeks now, and those 3 or 4 rods, normally having plenty of elbow room, find themselves taking it in turns to fish the same bits.
And so it will go on, until we get water.
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