news/editorial

29 May 2022 News/Editorial

With just two fishing days to go until the end of May, how is Tweed’s 2022 season shaping up?

Ignoring 2020, for lockdown/covid reasons, the spring (to end of May) historic average for years 2016-2021 inclusive is 1,215 salmon, if my maths is correct. Including Junction and Sprouston at around 300 between them (Junction nearing 200 and Sprouston 100), still absent from the Fishtweed totals, and making various assumptions about non reporters, a sporting guess at the 2022 total salmon catch is around 1,250-1,350, or slightly better than the 5 year average.

Springers are funny fish, in that you either have them or you do not, never knowingly evenly spreading their favours around, hence the extraordinary preponderance of Junction and Sprouston, just two beats catching 25% of the total.

You can prove almost anything with statistics, so it should be noted that if you take out 2016 (catch to end May 1,874), the four year average (again excluding 2020) from 2017-2021 is just 876 salmon to end May, so that the 2022 catch is very substantially better than that.

Make of all that what you will.

The one constant since the end of March has been lack of meaningful rain, with barely a day’s fishing lost to adverse water conditions. Whereas some rain is forecast next week until Thursday, present indications are that it is unlikely to do more than rise levels by a few inches, if that. Having just seen the river, now as low as it has been all year, more water is desperately needed.

Cool and showery/rainy to start with, from Thursday it will become both drier and warmer.

--00--

As this year’s main smolt run nears its conclusion, another kind correspondent has alerted to me to a paper written in January 2022 on the subject of PKD, Proliferative Kidney Disease and here is the link (please copy and paste)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jfd.13585

Do read it, if for no other reason that it gives (maybe) one of the possible clues as to why increasing temperatures could either now, or certainly in the future as global warming progresses, be so intolerable for our salmonids, all of which prefer cool water.

That there is something going on to restrict the numbers of returning adult salmon, in all rivers, as compared to 20-50 years ago is a given, it is just that nobody (yet) has worked out what it is and whether anything can be done about it. Mutterings about it all happening in the sea are more born out of “where else can it be?” than any understanding of what it is in the sea that is the culprit.

But what if it isn’t all in the sea after all?

Now I have no idea if PKD is an issue yet in the Tweed and its many tributaries, but if it is a problem in Norwegian rivers, further north and less warm than the Tweed, then you would think it should at least be a risk to be investigated.

Not only that, but amongst the mitigations are riparian tree planting (often talked about in these pages) and releasing cool waters, in times of extreme drought and heat, from the deeper and cooler parts of our reservoirs in our compensation freshets. Whereas we know instinctively that increasing heat in the river is a risk, this paper gives just one possible specific danger to our fish from ever heating water.

If the paper does nothing else, and if PKD is not already an issue here, it serves as a wake up call, if such were needed, of what the future might hold if we do not act.

We, and all other rivers in Scotland, have been warned.

Instagram now found at tweedbeatsfishing