news/editorial

27 May 2018 News/Editorial

A marginally better week, for some, despite summer weather and water levels, brought last week’s rod catch to 75 salmon and 7 sea trout, making the cumulative totals to 26th May 597 salmon and 54 sea trout.

The forecast for next week looks to be largely dry and warm, but with better prospects for rain and a breakdown in the current settled spell as we enter June.

Let’s hope so, because if there are (at last) more fish waiting to come in, 2 or 3 feet of water will both encourage them and bring more life to Tweed’s depleted salmon pools.

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The supposed mackerel explosion in the North Atlantic caused some googling research.

Possible villains of our “lost at sea” salmon, where was the evidence?

It did not take long to find.

Pre 2000 neither the Faroese nor the Icelanders bothered with mackerel. Why? There were none. Nearly 20 years on, and the North Atlantic 1c-2c warmer, and after a quota fight with the EU, who both countries ignored, in 2017 the Icelanders caught 145,000 tonnes and the Faroese 210,000 tonnes of mackerel.

Which is quite a lot, as your average mackerel is not that heavy.

For 2018 the overall EU, Norway and Faroes quota has been set at a reduced figure of over 800,000 tonnes amid concerns of overfishing.

I remember not much of Professor Jens Christian Holst’s talk, well it was a year ago, other than the main theme that mackerel were largely to blame for the demise of our grilse. But I do recall him saying this, that there were so many mackerel that, for the good of other species, the EU should encourage fishing fleets to catch as many as possible.

No quotas, a free for all on mackerel would be good, he reckoned.

My basic researches will clearly not tell the whole story, but it sounds as if the Faroes have agreed to an EU quota for 2018, but the Icelanders have not.

From a salmon perspective, perhaps we should be hoping, that in their normal very independent way on matters fishy, the Icelanders continue to catch as many mackerel as they want in 2018.

But the longer term worry is that the warming North Atlantic, and its direct and indirect side effects for a cold water species such as our salmon, is making their life and survival in the oceans more difficult than it has ever been before.

The trend of declining salmon numbers may or may not be a result of warmer seas…..but it is suspiciously coincident.

Can our salmon adapt, survive and prosper, and is there anything we can do, in the short term, in the ocean environment to help them?

Those are the 64,000 dollar questions.