news/editorial

30 April 2017 News/Editorial

So what on earth is going on?

Few spring salmon being caught, the river dead low and little sign of meaningful rain, Gardo net killing salmon when it should not be, 2017 on course to being the worst spring since 2009, what else can go wrong?

It all reminds me of early 2010 when things were almost equally bleak, and the murmurings and rumblings of discontent then, amongst our anglers and others, are just beginning to show themselves again now.

For context, the 2009 spring rod catch was 1,147, and 2010 was 1,445, “spring” here meaning to 30th June. By my reckoning, the 2017 rod catch so far will be under 600.

With 2 months to go, we are certainly in the same territory as 2009 and 2010. Again for context, last year, in 2016, the spring rod catch was 2,464, so, barring miracles, we are going to get nowhere near that.

You will need to be a seriously “glass half full” person to see much good in all this.

In April 2010, half way through that spring, the RTC imposed full 100% catch and release for the first time (up to then it had been “every other fish” released). To say it was unpopular does it no justice. I was asked fishing on another beat just after full C&R had been imposed, and on arrival one of my fellow rods, on being introduced, turned his back and muttered as he walked away “you’re the person who has made it pointless me going fishing because everything has to go back”.

Times, and attitudes, change.

The grumblings in 2010, sometimes amounting to personal abuse against RTC and Tweed Foundation staff, were based on exactly the same things as they are just beginning to be now, viz “you need a hatchery”, “ you should be killing all the seals, goosanders and cormorants, they are to blame”, the ever present “Russian trawlers” and so on.

The trouble with all this, both now and as it was in 2010, is that it is all knee jerk stuff, based on little other than frustration, which we all feel, and a belief that someone somewhere is to blame.

Few seem to consider the vagaries of nature, the inevitable ups and downs, in what is a wholly wild resource. In other words, why can we not accept that the dreadfully bad spring of 2009, when we caught just 1,147 salmon, was the other side of the same coin as the autumn of 2010, just over a year later, when we, the rods, caught a smallish matter of 21,774 salmon between 1st July and 30th November?

I will not bother rehearsing all the same old arguments eg no hatchery manager has ever succeeded in specifically breeding a juvenile which after release has come back as a spring salmon; that even by the EA’s own figures the Tyne hatchery now only accounts for a maximum of 3% of its annual rod catch, and at considerable expense; that the evidence from Tweed’s quarterly bird counts is that there are pretty much exactly the same numbers of goosanders and cormorants as there have ever been over the last 20 years; and no, nobody will ever allow us to shoot the seals in Berwick harbour and off the Farne Islands, so there is little point in discussing it; and yes, it would be nice if the sinister Mr Putin, bored with the mundane business of irradiating his political opponents, was to blame for targeting his trawler fleets and factory ships on the UK salmon population,....but I don’t think he is.

In the old days we used to blame the nets and poaching, and with some reason, but now there is almost none of either, so there has been a narrowing of things to blame, but still we have good and bad years.

While all along, given that rivers like the Tweed are very well run and devoted to maximising juvenile fish and smolt production, most of it is up to nature and what happens in the sea.

If we killed every goosander, cormorant and seal, had a hatchery and sank Mr Putin’s mythical trawlers and factory ships…...and still had bad years, who would be to blame then?

Of course, in 2010, it all went very quiet after the 21,774 autumn rod catch that autumn.

Beware.

The blamers are on the march again.

But before they set off on that march, or start banging their drums, they would do well to remember that things can change very quickly.

As they did in 2010.