news/editorial

27 March 2016 News/Editorial

After 3 weeks of settled weather and with the river almost at summer level, we are ready for rain and a flood….which is exactly what we now have.

It will stir things up and maybe encourage what fish there are in the sea to come in, which would be welcome after a distinct lack last week.

With the spring 5 years ago in 2011 being one of the best of recent times (the catch was 3,072, 50% higher than the spring average of around 2,000), theory would have it that spring 2016 would be as good, because a strong parental generation should, in turn, mean a strong run of their children.

But after 2014 and 2015, confidence in theory has been shot, for 2010 and 2011 were stellar autumn years which should have resulted in very strong grilse and salmon runs 4 and 5 years later…….but they did not.

Which has puzzled not only we amateurs, but also the scientists.

One of the more sensible theories, but which sits most uncomfortably with the increasing trend for catch and release at all times of the year, is that in both 2011 and 2012 we had a surfeit of summer and autumn spawners.

Which reminds me of the days when Neil Graesser was Chairman of the then ASDSFB

(Association of Scottish District Salmon Fishery Boards) in the early 1980s, and the Tweed resigned when the ASDSFB agreed that any further reduction in netting (which was then rife) would lead to too many salmon getting to the spawning beds, overcutting of the redds, too many juveniles for which there would be insufficient food, resulting in starvation and huge losses of fry and parr.

For all the wrong reasons, because netting unsustainably killed 10s of 1,000s of salmon in those days, did the ASDSFB have a point?

Let us suppose that in a given section of one of the tributaries, the Leader perhaps, which is known to contain large quantities of juvenile salmon, that in both 2010 and 2011 there was a superabundance of eggs and resulting fry, far too many for the available food to support.

If there would normally be (say) 1,000 fry in a given area, of which 50 would normally survive to smolt stage, but suddenly there are 5,000 fry. What then? Could that mean that the starvation is such in the whole population that only 20, worse still just 5 or 10 make it to smolt stage?

In simple terms, more, too many mouths to feed, as in any famine, could be disastrously less.

Could we Tweed anglers, in 2010 and 2011, have been doing exactly the wrong thing by releasing so many of the fish we caught in the summer and autumns of those 2 years?

Or were there so many salmon that whether we killed them or not would have made little difference to the resulting overpopulation of juveniles, if such there was?

It could well be that we got it wrong, but the “catch and release” genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and on a purely personal level I cannot imagine now being willing to kill everything I catch. I still wince when I look at old photographs of me and my friends with rows of dead fish alongside the grinning anglers.

To be manageable, any “kill” policy in years of plenty would also involve a degree of prescience about the overall strength of the run, which is unlikely to be possible, for how can we ever know in September how many salmon are still to come in in October and November?

So it is that with no netting to speak of to harvest any surfeit we may be have in bumper years, we will just have to accept that, far from those bonanzas resulting in more bonanzas 4 or 5 years later, they may produce something rather more average.

Or even less than average.

Which could explain the disappointments of both 2014 and 2015, not a product of problems in sea survival, as most now believe……

but of something rather closer to home, and partly of our own making.

Not enough summer and autumn (by origin) smolts survived in the river to go out to sea to ensure a big run of returning grilse and summer and autumn salmon in 2014 and 2015.

You may scoff, but much more learned (scientific) voices than mine have been saying something similar.

And they, too, have no idea what, if anything, we could have done about it.