28 August 2022 News/Editorial
There is a, yet unresolved, puzzle when we get to the end of August and we have had consistently insufficient water, for months past, to encourage salmon to come in from the sea.
Are there 1,000s of fresh salmon still in the sea, which would normally have come in in July and August, but have either chosen not to do so because the river environment is much less appealing in its weedy and smelly state than remaining in the sea, or have they been physically unable to do enter the river, for want of that magic ingredient, water?
I hear that there is precious little sign of salmon queuing up in the estuary, and in the lower reaches, and that both the commercial net at Gardo and the research net at Paxton are catching little or nothing. The concern must be that, as has been the case for the last few years, very few silver salmon come in from the sea after 1st September, and that any that do come in will now set off for Peebles and Hawick at top speed, giving anglers little chance.
Fewer than 75 salmon were caught last week, in many ways a surprisingly large total given the near impossibility of your fly coming round without catching weed.
The forecast for next week is more of the same, certainly no rain for at least another 5 days, with maybe something wetter and more disturbed by the weekend. If that produces a flood, a big “if” as past “wet” predictions have shown, it will then be unfishable for another two or three days after that, so that the very earliest we can expect to be fishing in good river conditions is around the 7th or 8th of September.
To continue the depressing, if realistic, theme, as most agree that there is unlikely to be much worth catching in November (many beats do not now even try to let November fishing), then the remaining salmon fishing season has been reduced to a maximum of around 6 or 7 weeks.
That it could be a good 6 or 7 weeks fishing is all we can now hope for, in the most frustrating of all salmon fishing years that has been season 2022.
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