27 April 2014 News/Editorial
So Orri and Jock Monteith, who, we are told is a long time gillie and angling guide from Tayside, are calling for 100% catch and release, all year round on all rivers in Scotland.
There is an online petition on change.org; it isn’t going well, when I last looked 350 people had signed.
Now I have some (only some) sympathy with it, the logic being that you cannot expect the nets to stop netting and killing salmon if the rods are killing them….and of course we anglers just hate the nets killing salmon. Have you ever met a rod fisherman who thought netting was a good idea?
They say that very roughly the (Scottish rivers’) rods kill 20,000 salmon pa out of a total rod catch of 100,000 (very optimistic as the 2013 catch will have struggled to get to 80,000).
Mr Monteith also wants “proper fish counters set up at the base of Scotland’s rivers so that an accurate record can be kept….”. Well, don’t we all want that, it would be the ultimate management tool, to know exactly how many fish come up to spawn, but Mr Monteith should know they tried it many years ago on the Dee at a cost of over £400,000 and it never worked…for all sorts of reasons, natural, technical and logistical. Bang went £400,000….in short, forget it.
If I ever had that sort of money to give away, the very last thing I would spend it on would be a fish counter at the base of any of our major salmon rivers. On each small spawning tributary maybe, because the logistics are easier, the power of floods less immense, and they can work well there….. but on the main stem, no.
And 100% catch and release here all year round? Certainly up to the end of June and maybe a bit beyond that, but once you get to the end of August and the main autumn run begins?
Dr Ronald Campbell’s tagging evidence is that we Tweed rods catch about 1 in 20 autumn fish (more like 1 in 3 of springers which are in the river longer and more likely to be caught) that come in to the river, and on average we catch say 12,000 autumn salmon and grilse every year, of which we kill 25%, or 3,000.
Therefore, the estimated population of autumn salmon and grilse on Tweed could be something like 240,000 . In 2010 when we caught over 20,000 in the autumn, it could well have been more than 240,000.
By killing 3,000 (most of them small grilse rather than the big spawning females which most anglers put back), we leave well over 200,000 to spawn.
This is more than enough for abundance in future years.
So although I understand where Orri is coming from and would like to agree with him because I would like to see all netting end…..I can’t quite.
The difference of course between rods here and nets in the sea is that sea nets have no idea whose fish they are catching and therefore whether they are catching part of a small endangered stock on a river with very few fish, or catching part of a much bigger stock on a more successful river.
We here on Tweed do know; we know we can afford to kill some autumn fish; we know we cannot afford to kill any spring fish because we have incredibly few, maybe under 6,000 in a good spring.
So, with some regret, because I never like even very slightly disagreeing with Orri, I shall not be signing the petition, and hope to be able to catch and kill just one or two grilse for eating (salmon fishcakes!) and one or two bigger ones for smoking (nothing better!) this coming autumn.
It will seem ungrateful to the man who has done more than any other to save the Atlantic salmon.
Ah well….which reminds me, I owe him a bottle of Syndicate 58/6 whisky.
It’s good stuff.
--ooOoo---
There is something very annoying about things that are said about salmon and salmon fishing, when those things gain common currency, but are just plain wrong.
If I hear one more time that seals are responsible for springers this year not stopping before they get to Kelso, I will scream. The seals have nothing whatever to do with that. We have had no seals at Coldstream and below for a month or more now, and still the salmon go straight through. In the autumn we have seals and we have loads of fish; seals are a temporary nuisance and you don’t want one in the pool you are fishing, but that’s it.
Let me explain.
The salmon is a shoal fish, it likes friends. So what does it do when it comes into the Tweed at Berwick, it meanders its way upstream but finds no friends, so it keeps going until it finds them…..at Kelso.
It really is that simple.
Last year 2013, the river was low and incredibly cold in the spring, so the fish moved slower (they do in very cold water) and they found other springer friends and kelts lower down than this year, so they stopped. This year 2014, February was warm and loads of floods, so the kelts never settled in the lower river and the springers shot through in the warmer water, until they got tired around Kelso. And now, even if the water is lower, there simply are no numbers of fish below Coldstream to attract new fish coming in to stop.
We have seen it many times before down here, we will no doubt see it again, it is no mystery!
Of course, the other side of that same coin, is that in the summer and early autumn, with grilse and sea trout coming in to the river when it is low, in and out on the tide, with no floods to encourage them to run upstream, they settle in those big pools at Tillmouth, Tweedmill and below and then fresh fish coming in find friends down there and linger. It is then that the middle and upper beats can miss out because all the fresh fish stop off with their friends at Coldstream and below, and only move up later when they are older, redder and more difficult to catch.
None of this has anything to do with seals.
Is that clear?
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