news/editorial

26 October 2014 News/Editorial

Relentlessly upbeat fishing reports from some Tweed websites over recent weeks and months have been difficult to recognise for those of us who actually know what is going on.

Indeed, that word “difficult” has been about as close as these sites appear to have come to admitting that the fishing has been ….well “difficult” I suppose covers it, but only if if we must indulge in ghastly euphemisms. What about …...“challenging” ?

Anything, it would seem, other than admitting the blindingly obvious to anyone, who can both read and has what used be O level maths, observing the “catches” pages…..that is….the fishing this autumn has been poor, quite simply because there are not as many salmon as we have become used to ever since 1987 and the big in-river net buy out, which reduced the nets between Berwick and Coldstream from over 20 to no more than a handful.

This trend to higher autumn rod catches became even more pronounced in 2003 when the North East drift netters were curtailed.

The oxygen of websites such as this (and nameless others) are fish catches…..with high catches, all in the garden is rosy…….without them, everything is palpable gloom and despondency, and, most crucially, everyone can see at the press of a button what is, or this year sadly is not, being caught.

Now there are those who will say that this weekly offering has been too downbeat, perhaps too often saying it as it is, that the grilse are mostly missing, that the same thing has happened elsewhere in Scotland, as well as Iceland and Norway, the east coast of North America and even most (but not all) of Russia.

But folk are not fools, and if you live by the sword (immediately available fish catches), then you die by that same sword when catches are poor...quite simply because lettings are down, likely tenants staying at home, saving their money because they can see at a glance that their chances of catching something are not what they have become used to.

Like the lastminute.com booking of a sun holiday in Bermuda just before hurrican Gonzalo struck last week….one click on the Bermuda weather forecast and you will stay at home.

It is emphatically not a disaster, there are plenty of fish and indeed if this were the spring, you would think the catches were remarkably good...but as was explained last week, autumn fish are not in the river long, they become coloured and harder to catch much quicker than springers, and of course one big flood and a lot of them are gone, right through to the safety of the spawning areas. For the river as whole, we need 20 for every 1 we will catch.

So you need a serious number of them to keep all the beats and anglers happy for the 3 months of September to end November...and this year we do not have them.

On a positive note, we hope it is a blip, we also hope that all those grilse that should have come back this year, will come back next as 8lb to 15lb salmon...and if I was prospective taker of salmon fishing with a yen for a speculative punt (I am neither!), I would take a lot of salmon fishing next year.

But in the meantime, the catch numbers tell the story, and pretending something different insults all of our collective intelligence.

ooo0ooo

Two further snippets this week:

1. If you refer back to the 29th June offering in these pages, you will see a justified vilification of all things “salmon fish farm” off the west coast of Scotland. My generous correspondent tells me that he and his allies are fighting 3 new fish farm applications in south Skye in Lochs Slapin and Eishort and he is seeking support before 7th November and 21st November respectively, so please comment in support of his campaign by logging onto www.blue-skye.org.uk (also in his book HOLES written by James Merryweather for the purpose of defeating these applications and others, available for £3 vla Amazon PDF download).
2. It would seem the 1lb to 3lb grilse has made a belated comeback this year, some beats last week reporting eg “caught 3 this morning, best 2.5 lbs”. When you look at something that small, it is hard to imagine it went down to the sea last April (2013) and spent 18 months growing by so little, let alone being brave enough to go as far the Faroe Islands for lunch. They look to me as if they went to the sea as smolts this year (April 2014) and have never overwintered or gone far offshore….whatever they are, and we have seen them before, they are distinctly odd.