news/editorial

29 June 2014 News/Editorial

When I was a boy, one of the greatest excitements was our occasional invitation as a family to stay at Camasunary on the Isle of Skye.

The sea trout fishing was spectacular, as was the location of Camasunary itself, almost on the beach and looking out over the sea to those most romantic, if curiously named phonetically, islands of Rhum, Eigg and Muick.

No electricity then, not even a generator, with the smallest room in the house outside, and consequent peril from invading midges when you were about your daily business.

You arrived there either by boat from Elgol or by overland hike. It was, and still is, incredibly remote, with the magnificent, statuesque Cuillins behind, the glorious beach and the sea in front.

It belongs, as it then belonged, to the Johnson family, albeit with an interlude when partially owned by Ian Anderson of the Jethro Tull clan.

So where am I going with this?

Salmon fish farms is where.

One of the great centrally sanctioned, and consistently denied, acts of environmental vandalism of the last 25 years has been the devastating effect that fish farms have had on many Scottish west coast (above Glasgow) salmon and sea trout rivers and lochs…..the reason is incredibly simple.

Sea lice.

The vast quantities of salmon in cages produce equally vast numbers of sea lice which, when dispersed, attack any wild smolt trying to make its way from the river, via the contained sea lochs in which all the salmon cages are located, to the open seas beyond…and the smolts are smothered with sea lice and die.

That is it.

It is true now, it has been for many years and it will continue to be true, unless and until something is done about the location of fish farms.

It matters not how often politicians and the fish farming lobby deny any responsibility …..they are wrong and, worse still, they know it.

Which brings us back to Camasunary because, since my childhood days there, when the fishing for sea trout was sensational, it declined, as did that of Loch Maree, another even more famous sea trout fishery, and with the subsequent arrival of fish farms in the nearby sea lochs, never really recovered.

Now, just as some sort of resurgence is under way, as I understand it, as a result of fallowing (no fish farms) for a few years in the sea lochs around Camasunary, a planning application is under consideration to start it all up again with more fish farms.

I caught a Moony (any sea trout over 8lbs) in Loch Na Creitheach (pronounced Na Cray) in the 1960s, the tradition at Camasunary being that you had to draw it, life size, and place it on the walls in Camasunary itself. The walls were covered with them, a very visible reminder of how good the fishing was in the past and how poor it has become since; I cannot draw, so you will not find mine there, nor my father’s 10 lber caught in the bay, in the sea, in a year when the river was low and the sea trout could not get in. I recall him saying that it set off for America, out towards Rhum, Eigg and Muick, and he could not see any reason why it should come back. He hung on as his backing disappeared out to sea; one can only imagine the moment of triumph when he rolled the monster sea trout up onto the sand; never has the word “beached” been more appropriate.

I have no idea if the Camasunary fish farm application (Loch Slapin if you want to look it up) is a result of our Great Leader cosying up to China and committing to selling vast quantities of Scottish farmed salmon to the Chinese, but it would be no surprise if it was.

The ghettoisation of the west coast rivers as the place to put all Scottish fish farms is a scandal, but one the politicians have got away with. It is almost as if they have agreed that the rivers there have been ruined anyway, so they might as well go on doing it. Money is behind it all, they say jobs as well but how many jobs have really been created on the west coast as compared to the loss of businesses, jobs and livelihoods from the demise of the wild fishing industry there? Or are the majority of these ”fish farm” jobs in processing factories far from the west coast in Aberdeen and elsewhere?

We on the east coast share some of the blame for allowing this to happen; we have been too silent and too complicit, because the problem was “over there”, not over here.

Who was it (Burke?) who first said “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”?

The big guns in wild salmon fishing are on the Scottish east coast and the politicians are savvy enough not to even try to put fish farms in any of the east coast river estuaries, even if the topography allowed it, because they know that all hell will be let loose.

And if the east coast rivers think they are immune, well maybe they are from the scourge of sea lice, but what about escapees?

I hear tell of a large fish farm escapee (“tailless wonder” in the jargon because pre escape all they ever do is swim around in circles in their cages so their tails do not develop) being caught in our nets here last week; had it not been caught, would it have spawned and contaminated our native Tweed gene pool?

Every year tens of thousands of farmed fish escape from their cages and become part of the ocean going salmon stock, with as yet unknown genetic consequences for the wild stock.

So will anyone, any time soon, catch another Moony in Loch Coruisk (I never did in Coruisk but I remember being put on an island in the middle of the Loch and, so clear was the water, being able to see vast sea trout swimming around below me) or in Loch Na Creitheach when staying at Camasunary?

Until salmon fish farms are located where they cannot impact our wild fisheries, I fear not.

As one of our more outspoken political commentators put it in relation to the Camasunary/Loch Slapin planning application, but I would extend it to the whole fish farm business on the west coast and its devastating environmental effect over decades on an unique and precious Scottish resource….

“It’s a f…ing disgrace!”

So it is.