news/editorial

2 December 2018 News/Editorial

The final score for the year, within 90% accuracy, looks like 5,580 salmon and 763 sea trout.

No further comment is required.

--00--

What follows (unmissable, so please do read on) is written by my old friend Bill Thomson, Chairman of the RTC in the 1980s, whose idea it was to set up the Tweed Foundation. He was hugely influential in many ways, not least in reducing Tweed’s then unsustainable exposure to in-river netting.

We have much to thank him for.

In mentioning his mantras, he has forgotten one, which was “to put an end to all poaching”, out of control at that time, easy to forget now and a testament to his success, for we have almost none (and no cracks please about “no wonder, as there is nothing to poach”!).

As we go into the off-season and the Christmas break, this will be the last post until February 2019 when battle re-commences.

What Bill (aka Corporal Fraser) has to say is always thought provoking. This is no exception, it is right up there with his best. I am most grateful to him for writing it.

With my most heartfelt, almost desperate, good wishes that you have better (could it be worse?) fishing, despite Fraser’s gloom, in 2019, and that you all have a very Happy Christmas and New Year.

So...hang onto your hats.

Here it is.

--00--

“Just over 50 years ago I remember looking over Peel Bridge on the Upper Tweed in the middle of September and counting the salmon that lay below in a shoal. The river ran full and the bottom was clear. Most of the fish were coloured, a mixture of Spring and Summer run fish and the trick was to try and spot an early fresh “ back-ender” that heralded the start of the autumn run. Salmon numbers were not the problem, it was trying to find a fresh one that might take the fly.

Skip forward 50 years and the same view in mid September will give you a view of some dirty stones, a dead low river and no fish.

Over the 50 years there has been no shortage of debate or well meaning effort to improve the situation but too much of it is carried out by optimists who have little willingness to challenge or even acknowledge the elephants standing in the room. For sure I was one of them. During my years as Chairman of the Tweed Commissioners, a member of the Association of District Fishery Boards and a member of the early government appointed committee under Professor Dunnet, I held three simple mantras as my guiding philosophy: get rid of the nets, knock down the access obstacles to the spawning grounds and kill the predators. The fish will do the rest.

Sadly time has shown that, whilst laudable and helpful, only one of the three mantras has any real relevance to the disaster that has unfolded for Tweed and most UK rivers.

Let us look at the elephants.

The first is reduction in water flow. 50 years ago there was minimal water extraction from the Tweed headwaters and the reservoirs and dams were frequently discharging at far higher levels than required by statute as there was no need to capture every drop. Skip forward 50 years and the reservoirs are now connected to a grid that allows water to be transferred from the Tweed headwaters to Edinburgh, East Lothian and the Central belt. Use Google to count the number of new houses in the valley, in Peebles, Innerleithen, Galashiels, Hawick, Kelso, etc etc but also around Edinburgh and East Lothian, multiply by the known usage of each household and their lush gardens and you will understand why the river runs far lower than it used to. Of course there are occasional floods but as a whole the river runs about a third lower than it did 50 years ago and the cleansing power of flow has greatly diminished. So for most of the fishing season be prepared to look at a dead low river and dirty stones. But at least the sprinkler at home will keep your lawn looking nice.

The next elephant is pollution.

Having googled the number of houses and their water consumption to reach the total of cubic meters of water consumed next apply the same household numbers to the known usage of active ingredient household chemicals for those houses. Clothes washing powder, dishwasher powders, surface cleaners, washing up liquids and the myriad of chemical poured into toilets that promise to kill every known germ. These active ingredients do not magically disappear in the ancient sewage works built with 19th century technology. They flow down the river as a diluted but cumulatively deadly toxin, the effects made worse by the low river flows. Time will probably demonstrate that the micro plastics that are supposedly invading the sea are invading our rivers too. 50 years ago households used a fraction of the modern chemicals provided on today’s supermarket shelves and the river teemed with fly and invertebrates that are steadily becoming a distant memory.

The next elephant is predation.

The argument with the bird protection lobby with its huge political clout and ill informed city dweller support seems lost. There are now literally hundreds of goosanders and cormorants to give support to the flourishing heron and otter populations. Make your own mind up how many there are and how much they weigh and multiply the two numbers together to give you the daily weight consumption of fish from the river. Such a huge tonnage, yes tonnage, whether they are salmon, trout, minnows or grayling is unsustainable in any river and is a pointer as to why very few smolts survive the dirty, shrinking river and make it out to sea. Probably only the spawning tributaries now provide any smolts at all as the combination of low river flows and hundreds of shovel beaked goosanders digging up the redds in the main river ensure there are few survivors from river redds. 50 years ago the sighting of one goosander would have boatmen and gamekeepers running to find a shotgun to claim the bounty payable at the local police station.

The last elephant is fish farming.

Although it does not apply to the east coast rivers the menace of fish farming on the west coast needs no introduction or amplification. It is a catastrophic disaster operated in a laissez faire fashion and overseen by ignorant politicians who have little care for anything but a few votes for the jobs it creates. The environment, the fish (who could forget that horrifying clip showing salmon being devoured in the cages by their own sea lice) and the surrounding seas are being destroyed. If consumers could see the conditions these poor creatures live in and what they eat before having their flesh chemically changed in colour for the supermarket shelves, I suspect they would rapidly come off the menu. It will only be a matter of time before it is not just the wild salmon and sea trout we have lost but whole colonies of sea creatures will start to die from the cage discharges. I am already aware of a crisis in one part of South America where discharges from shrimp farms have killed out all the crabs and devastated a wild lobster fishery over a huge area. The solution is easy but so far unacceptable on cost grounds. Put the farms into old oil tankers and moor them on suitable sand banks. They have the tanks and pump systems to allow conversion to effective filtering and segregation of water and waste together with a controlled medication environment to prevent pests like sea lice.

The missing elephant is sea survival.

Sorry, but apart from rivers near fish farms, I just don’t buy into stories about losses on the sea migration being responsible for poor salmon runs. Rivers with no fish are simply not putting smolts to sea. Counting them coming out of a tributary or in spawning areas is of little use to give a migration figure when there are packs of hungry cormorants waiting to intercept them before they reach the estuary. Yes salmon runs cycle, grilse numbers rise and fall and there are good and bad migrations but if Iceland can successfully send smolts to sea why can’t Scotland? Actually it can and does. Have a look at the Thurso. No water extraction, no pollution, no fish farms nearby and limited predators due to a successful program of keeping them moving. And lots and lots of fish.

So where does it all go from here? Sorry again, but the realistic answer for the big east coast rivers rivers is from bad to worse and for the west coast rivers near fish farms, probable species elimination. More houses are being built so there will be less water. More houses mean more pollution. There is no sign of a political will to reverse the protection of predator birds and no sign of a political will to regulate fish farms into properly controlled tanks.

We’re doomed Captain Mainwaring.”