news/editorial

27 October 2019 News/Editorial

Whereas last week, the third in October, not so long ago would have marked the peak of the autumn run, despite pretty well perfect fishing conditions, the catch scores showed a (now) more familiar pattern of decline.

196 salmon and 40 sea trout may not sound too bad, if a very distinct drop on the week before, but pre 2014 that weekly total would often have been caught in just one day. The accumulated score, within 90% accuracy, to 26th October 2019 is 5,446 salmon and 1,859 sea trout.

As for next week, the forecast is cold and clear, at least until Thursday/Friday. With the water as clean as a whistle and levels slowly dropping, conditions will be good, but will the fishing?

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The unique late Orri Vigfusson always talked about having “an abundance of fiske”, for he knew that to have successful river fishing, having a subsistence stock is not good enough. We need much more than that. The reason, of course, is that we anglers only ever catch around 15-20% of the salmon that come into the river. So, whereas a population of 20,000-30,000 salmon will be more than enough to fully stock the upper reaches of the Tweed and its many tributaries with eggs and then with fry, it will mean we only ever catch around 4,000-6,000 annually by rod and line.

Now you might think that there is nothing like 30,000 salmon in the river now, and I would have some sympathy with that, but of the fish tagged and released at Paxton, remarkably few have been caught by Tweed anglers, indicating that even a 15-20% catch rate, over the season as a whole, by the rods may be on the high side.

So if we want to catch 10,000 to 12,000 salmon a year, as we used to pre 2014, we need 50,000+ salmon and grilse to come in, which in turn means getting much higher smolt survival in the sea than the 3% we supposedly get now.

Now, some will scoff at these figures, but let us suppose we now send 1 million smolts to sea every year, that means at 3% we (only) get 30,000 back. In the 1960s and 1970s the return rate was more like 30%, or 300,000 coming back. Even after the multitude of high seas, coastal and river nets have had their fill (remember the Greenland nets alone reported catching 2,700 tonnes, or over 600,000 salmon, an astonishing figure, in 1971), there were more than enough for the rods to catch and to stock the river.

So how do we get the smolt survival rate up from 3% to more like the 30% of 50 years ago?

Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any conclusive answer, except that that it almost certainly lies in the sea. The only real debate is whether we should now try to find out, even if there may be nothing, in the vastness of the North Atlantic, that we can do about it, and even if it is very expensive?

Some of us think we probably should.

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My kind correspondent has sent me the following link https://actions.sumofus.org/a/fishing-the-feed about scooping up intolerable amounts of fish in faraway waters, to the huge detriment of local populations, all to fuel our aquaculture industries, in effect feeding scrunched up wild fish to feed, in meal form, to farmed fish for western markets.

Need one say, our salmon farming industry, those masters of the Donald Trump school of denials, has said “Nothing to do with us, Guv’nor”, just as they have always refuted any blame for the demise of all those wonderful west coast Scottish lochs and rivers, the Lochy, the Awe, Loch Maree, the Ewe and so many more.

As Mandy Rice Davies once (nearly) said “ Well, they would, wouldn’t they?”.

It is an assumption by Tweedsiders that the ills of salmon farming hardly affect us. Because we are so far away, we ignore the very obvious fact that our smolts will swim both north and then west, right into the eye of the sea lice storm from fish farms, after they leave the safety of home waters.

We think we can see the damage goosanders and cormorants do to our smolts, and we probably overestimate it. By the same token, out of sight and out of mind, you never hear anyone here worry about the effects of salmon farms around our north and west coasts, including the Orkneys and Shetland. They may do far more damage, cause far higher mortality to our smolts, than any cormorants or goosanders ever have.

We do not know. We need to find out.