news/editorial

27 July 2014 News/Editorial

I have been having flashbacks.

We keep back numbers of Trout and Salmon in the smallest room in the annex to our house, reserved for our fishermen.

I was paying an impromptu and wholly unscheduled visit (“too much information” I hear you cry), when I happened to pick up and peruse, as one does on these occasions, the back number of T&S from July 2009, exactly 5 years ago and just after the worst spring catches Tweed had experienced for some time, not wholly unlike where we are now in 2014 after another very poor spring.

I turned to the Letters pages.

An unhappy period of my life came rushing back before me, and it all started with an anonymous letter (how brave is that?) to T&S.

Space does not permit reproduction of the whole thing, but the message was that Tweed was doomed, the grilse were thin and getting thinner, the average weight of autumn fish had plummeted to 8lbs, the spring catches had been disastrous, a claim that grilse “may become a thing of the past” and, finally, “as you (the editor of T&S) wrote in last month’s “Comment”, perhaps it is time to help out the rivers with the installation of hatcheries”.

I then happened upon the T&S back number for June 2010 and a letter from one Richard Vainer. It would be too much to expect Mr Vainer to regret writing that letter, but to say it was uncomplimentary about Tweed’s management would be an understatement; it trotted out all the old chestnuts, blaming management, their decisions and especially the lack of a hatchery.

We heard very little from Mr Vainer or his anonymous predecessor after that, when the Tweed autumn catch, just a few short months later in 2010, produced an annual total of over 23,000, higher than any North Atlantic river has ever caught by rod and line before.

So imagine the wry smile on reading a letter in T&S June 2014 headed “Dee disaster”, after a very poor spring there (as here), which concludes “something is wrong…very wrong…and I have grave concerns for the future of the Dee”.

One of these days, all those who fish and love our rivers will realise that our salmon are a wild resource, there are good years and bad years, good springs and bad springs, good autumns and not so good autumns.

Bad springs imply nothing more than good springs about the competence of the management of our rivers, or about their long term health.

The Dee is a well managed river, Tweed is a well managed river, neither is facing any sort of disaster.

All our rivers are focusing on maximising smolt production, that done it is a matter of both luck and nature’s bounty how many of those smolts make it back as salmon or grilse.

I believe they are doing a good job, and maybe, when it rains, Tweed (and the Dee) will be full of fish again, and talk of disaster will seem both foolish and short sighted, as it most surely was in those back numbers of T&S in 2009 and 2010.