26 September 2021 News/Editorial
A best guess of 200 salmon, the great majority of the highly coloured variety, caught last week was not bad, given the ever shrinking water levels and the unseasonably high air/water temperatures.
The forecast for next week looks distinctly different, autumnal, with cooler winds and colder nights, and most probably some really significant rainfall. Water temperatures from Monday might be closer to 50F rather than the 60F figures of late, that in turn is likely to bring some of these old river fish on to take your fly. Together with any amount of fresh water, they will begin to move upstream.
If the last few years are any judge, any uplift in catches will be short lived, as the fish are closer to spawning and as they move into the upper reaches with increasing speed and urgency. If we have a larger flood or floods, the long term resident fish could disappear in one sudden westward migration. With news of practice redds being cut in the lowest beats, it is becoming time the fish push on, away to where they should be.
Which is not down here at Kelso, Coldstream and below, but to Hawick, Selkirk, Peebles and all points west.
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The shocking news that the most prolific river in Europe, the Norwegian/Finnish Tana, has been closed to salmon fishing in 2021, should be receiving more press than it is. Google will tell you that, on the one hand, the Tana was the most prolific river for rod caught salmon over the 10 years to 2019, averaging 11,000 pa (the Tweed is about 7,000 over the last 8 years), whilst on the other hand 2018, 2019 and 2020 have been so bad that the whole river has been closed to salmon fishing in 2021, with incalculable financial damage to the whole Tana catchment.
In other words, the juxtaposition of these two headlines proves one thing, that there has been a dramatic and sudden collapse, something to which we can relate with what happened to our autumn run in 2014. The extent of Tweed’s descent I like to headline with our November 2013 catch here, on just one beat, of 230 salmon; the next year, in 2014, we caught 47, and 5-7 years later in 2018-2020 our November average is just 3. The starkest element is that November salmon now are hardly/not worth catching, on the point of spawning, whereas of those caught in 2013, the majority down here, 15 miles from the sea, were fresh silver fish viz the Comments column of my Book on 12th November 2013 “Both (15 and 10lbs) magnificent fresh fish”.
The Tana has shut because, using sonar equipment, they have found out that there are only 14,600 salmon left in the river, which brings us neatly to the question of the great unknown in the Tweed, ie how many salmon do we have?
Some say that last year in 2020 we had nearly 100,000 salmon, of which some 6,000 we know went up the Ettrick, Gala and Whiteadder (which have counters), leaving the thick end of 90,000 to go up the only remaining tributaries. Let’s give the Till and Leader 10,000 (generous), that leaves 80,000+ to go up the Upper Tweed and the Teviot, say 40,000+ each. Really? Do you believe that? There was certainly remarkably little in the main stem downstream of Galashiels come spawning time in November, except kelts.
Whether you do or not believe those figures, the trouble is that we just do not know, ergo figures are all based on estimates of catch rates from tagging, and the result of these calculations are numbers which, to many of us, seem outlandishly large. But are they?
Most of those who live and/or work on or near the river, would say that fish numbers this year are of a different order to 2020, and the catches would tend to support that, but then with no floods since May, conditions for angling could hardly have been worse. The same three counters (Ettrick, Gala and Whiteadder) will at some point give us answers, and indeed they did prove that there were many more fish in 2020 than eg in 2018 which was the worst rod catch for 40 years. The Ettrick counter in 2018 was 1,216 salmon, possibly the lowest figure, if not ever, then for many many years, and very much mirroring the 40 year low rod catch.
2021 is shaping up to be worse than 2018 (of which more below), and we may have to go back beyond 40 years, 50 even to 1969, for a worse rod catch. Hopefully not. In 1969 there was massive in river and high seas netting, there is almost none in 2021, so that the depressives will conclude that there may now be fewer salmon trying to return to the Tweed than at almost any time, certainly in living memory and maybe for long before that. Now the rods have first “pick” at catching salmon, in the past they have always been last, after all home grown and foreign commercial netters had removed (often) vast quantities to be sold for food.
I hear tell of new sonar equipment, also used on the Tana, to count fish numbers, but how can that possibly work in a flood, when trees and endless other debris is coming down, the very time when fish can move most? I am reminded of the River Dee which spent £400,000 over 30 years ago on a main stem counter, but it never worked. It proved a very expensive mistake, even if the motives were unimpeachably good.
So where does that leave us? I fear the status quo will persist. The proper solution is to have counters on every spawning tributary, but the chances of that happening are close to zero on both cost and environmental grounds. So that the main information that river managers need will continue to be the subject of conjecture and guesstimation.
Does it matter? Well, we had a 40 year low rod catch in 2018, and a record ever low (probably) counter figure up the Ettrick in 2018, yet what did we do, what action was taken, as a result?
Exactly.
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We miss William Younger, he who so accurately recorded fish catches for 2 years and gave us information which we can only guess at now. Maybe this will correct itself when the new RTC website comes on stream, that is the plan as I understand it, one website on which all fish catches are recorded daily, thereby avoiding the sort of idle conjecture indulged in below.
Until then, here is the closest we can get to it up to today, 26th September 2021. When William was around, the shortcut method was to take Fishtweed’s “season so far” figure for their beats, and assume that represented about 66% of the river total. On that basis, if we take the “season so far” for Fishpal at say 2,200, if that is 66%, then the river total will be about 3,400.
As a double check, the beats that are only on Tweedbeats (Carham, Wark, Lees, Floors, Mertoun) have caught say 700 so far, then there are non reporting beats like Upper Pavilion, Gledswood, Lennel, Tweedmill, Watham and Dritness, and all the tributaries eg Till and Teviot; could they possibly have caught 500 to make up the total to 3400? Probably not, but for this purpose, let’s assume so.
Tweed’s catches have never dipped below 6,000 (except the 5,644 total in 2018) since 1979, and under 4,000 only once (in 1969) since the 1950s. Where we end up in 2021 is anyone’s guess, over 4,000 surely? Even 5,000, barring some unexpected piscatorial miraculous volte face, would seem to be as good as we could hope for.
The real figure, no guesswork, will, as ever, be published by the RTC at the end of February 2022, just before the AGM in March.
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