29 May 2016 News/Editorial
For those who have been following the Gardo netting station saga, there is good news in that after a little over a week of killing our Tweed spring salmon, the operator, Michael Hindhaugh, agreed to stop killing salmon until 16th June, the date from which the Tweed Foundation biologists advise no more spring salmon enter the river from the sea.
That he has stopped is to be congratulated, that he ever started is to be abhorred.
At the risk of flogging a dead horse, killing what everyone else on the Tweed and indeed in the whole of Scotland and England knows to be a very scarce resource, for spring salmon are rare everywhere in the UK, is both criminal elsewhere in England and little short of environmental vandalism per se. I am told the retail price of spring salmon when he was killing them was £55/kilo, an extraordinary price, making your average Tweed springer worth up to £150 for which nets would pay about £2 in Tweed levy/assessment. One imagines you need look no further as to why he was doing it, nothing to do with “heritage” , “social compromise” or for tourism.
It is not clear what his plans are for Gardo for 2017, but the RTC is firmly on notice that relying on voluntary measures no longer works, and that spring salmon must be given better protection, however that is done, before 1st April 2017 comes along.
---0---
As we enter the doldrums salmon fishing-wise in June and July, those “dog days” of summer, if that depressingly nagging north and east wind ever relents, it is worth reflecting on spring 2016.
That it has been thoroughly average is a good result, and although the Junction has not caught 300 as it did last year, they have still done well at getting on for 200. Other beats have done better than 2015, Birgham Dub being the best of the rest, along with the Floors beats, Sprouston and Hendersyde. The fish have also been more widespread, Tillmouth now doing well (as one imagines is Tweedmill) and the Mertouns having had 2 or 3 really excellent weeks of late, and the Pavilions, Dryburghs and Boleside beginning to pick up as the fish move west.
But “average” is all it is, with a total Tweed spring population estimated by the Tweed biologists to be no higher than 6,000, and no sign of the spring runs of yore returning.
That Birgham Dub has done well with a catch of 120 to date this year is a fact by today’s spring standards. You only have to read their web page to find out that they once, within living memory, caught 64 in a day in February, over half the Dub’s catch for the last 4 months.
It is a case of maintaining what we have in the spring, in the hope that, one day, those heady spring days of yore, will return.
---0---
And finally, as for those “dog days” of summer, there is a view (I am one of those with this view) that summer salmon and sea trout fishing on the Tweed is underrated, far from being the poor relation to the spring.
Given water it can be good, really good.
“Given water” is the problem and, of course, there will be days when the sun shines like a beacon out of a Mediterranean sky, and the golf course beckons.
But if you take summer fishing consistently for a few years, and like your brown trout and sea trout fishing, as well as salmon, you might, just occasionally, strike gold.
With no meaningful netting now for a number of years, many more summer salmon and sea trout are able to get into the river, whereas in the 1980s and before little or nothing could run the gauntlet of over 30 nets, fishing day and night in the summer, and hope to survive, other than in flood conditions.
The 5 year average salmon catches for both June and July are no different from the best spring months of April and May.
That was not the case pre 1987 and the first big netting buy-out.
our twitter feed