news/editorial

26 November 2017 News/Editorial

By way of some good, clean end of term fun, I wonder if you can guess when the following statements were reported?

I will give you two choices in each case.

“The RTC have given some attention to the shooting of cormorants which have presented themselves in increasing numbers and are very destructive of fish.” 1911 or 2017?

“One of the worst seasons on record. The angling season, following the enormous catches in (1903 or 2013), completed the contrast by being the worst on record.” 1904 or 2014?

“The autumn fishing was a complete failure for lack of fish.” 1898 or 2017?

“Very poor year….for the last 4 or 5 weeks of the season, the water was in excellent condition but there were no fish in it.” 1899 or 2017?

“The decline or disappearance of grilse in recent years; only 6 grilse out of a total catch of (254 or 145) salmon and grilse caught this autumn at Upper and Lower Floors.” 1916 or 2015?

“Scarcity of fish presents a very knotty problem.” 1895 or 2016?

“Autumn season worst on record. In (1911 to 1914, or 2014 to 2017) the proportion of salmon caught to grilse was higher than 5 to 1.” 1915 or 2017?

“The autumn fishing of (1908 or 2017) showed a decided scarcity of salmon. There were few salmon off the coast and this experience was not confined to the Tweed alone, but the whole of the East Coast of Scotland. Grilse were late, unusually small and disappointing in number.” 1908 or 2017?

“Shortage of salmon in the autumn is no new thing, but never a “back-end” as bad as this.” 1930 or 2017?

Ok, I have had my fun, and it takes no genius to work out that every one of those statements was made, not in 2014 to 2017, but, in every case, between 87 and 129 years ago…...but they could all have been made yesterday.

The point I make, and have been making for some time now, is that what has happened here over the last 4 years has happened before, before those beastly massive Russian trawlers scoured the seas, before there were any goosanders, before man-made global warming, even before the ghastly polluting fish farms.

The answer lies in the sea, it did 100 years ago and it does now.

There is now, it seems, an angling constituency which demands large numbers of fish every year, and has to blame somebody if that does not happen.

They are wrong to do so, as they would have been had they done that 100 years ago.

There have always been bad years, even clutches of bad years together viz both 1911 to 1915, and 2014 to 2017, but history tells us they do not last.

We should all be concerned about the continuing low levels of smolt survival in the sea, but that is a very different matter from the ever shifting run timings and components of our salmon…..about which we can do nothing, just as they could not over 100 years ago.

Despite the gloomy headlines of 1904 (“worst season on record”), of 1915 (“worst autumn on record”), of 1920 (autumn by autumn the Tweed gets steadily worse”), there were perfectly reasonable years, even some good grilse years, in between and, as gradually Tweed became both a predominantly salmon and spring river, by 1920 the angling press also said it was an “exceptionally good spring”, and by 1926 the fishing headlines contained the following extraordinary sentence:

“An angling year of splendid sport, during a long spring and short autumn, has ended with one rod accounting for 389 salmon on the Tweed; Hendersyde water yielded 475 spring salmon and Sprouston 357”.

And this despite the presence of over 100 full-time nets on the river and the coast in 1926.

We, just as they were in the early 1900s, are in transition from grilse to salmon domination, but, unlike them, angling recovery ought to be quicker, because we have no nets.

The only questions are (a) how long it will take for the salmon domination to gather full strength and (b) will these salmon come back in the spring, summer or autumn?

2018 just might ……

…....get us closer to the answers to both questions.