30 March 2014 News/Editorial
Numbers are the theme this week.
The purists don’t much like them, the daily posting of catches on websites such as this. They think it leads to competitive fishing and, in the wrong hands, it probably does; flogging the pools to death just so that your score on the website that night is higher than the beat next door, or the opposition over the water.
It also, they say, removes some of the mystique, leading to premature despair when numbers are low, and inflated expectations when the scores are big. No longer can you arrive on a Monday and ask “how have things been so far this spring?” without already knowing 90% of the answer.
But, like it or not, numbers are the lifeblood; a salmon river without salmon is like the South of France without sun; you won’t go there.
And, there is something very odd about Tweed’s spring catch numbers.
As a rule, we catch something over 2,000 springers in the 5 fishing months to 30th June.
But, and it tends to be a big BUT…every now and then we have a stinker, and these seem to come in pairs.
1997 and 1998, 1999 and 2000 (or is it fours?), then 2009 and 2010, they averaged around 1,000, hardly half that of other years.
In 2010 we scored 0 here for the whole month of April. Now that really is a stinker.
But it means nothing for the rest of the year; 2009 remained pretty poor, whereas 2010 ended up at a staggering record catch of over 23,000, despite the very poor start.
By way of a Half Term Report, here we are at the end of March, so what is 2014 looking like?
Well, the river score for the 2 months so far is something over 400, 75% of which have been caught within a gnat’s crochet of Kelso, the half dozen or so beats either side of that puzzling, but ultimately absurd, massive new lump of very black stone in Kelso square. If you have not seen it yet, answers, please, on a postcard as to what it all means?
February was flooded, so you might take that into account, but unlike November flooding when you cannot catch those fish you missed in December, you can catch those you missed in February in March, or indeed for the rest of the spring. So a flooded February should logically make March that much better than usual, which it probably just about was.
But the norm for February and March is 500, so we may be 10-15% down on that.
So far it looks distinctly average, but who knows because April and May are the best spring months; it is still all to play for.
A spring bonanza it will not be, something we have become well used to ever since UDN and the decline in spring runs in the late 1960s.
Last weekend I saw the owner of middle Dee beats Ballogie and Carlogie. They have had the best start for many years, over 120 between the two beats, yet Park (generally the most prolific beat on the river) down the bottom below Banchory, whose 5 year average for February and March is 76, has caught just 2. In similar vein, fewer than 10 salmon so far have been caught here below Coldstream bridge.
Had it been cold and dry, all these figures would have been very different.
I still hear those who say that sometime soon the spring run will come back to the vast numbers it reached for 40 years between the mid 1920s and the 1960s, and they say this despite complete lack of any evidence. Tweed’s norm over the last 2 centuries has been for late summer and autumn runs of salmon, that brief spring period seemingly an aberration.
So the chances are that this spring will be pretty much like others of late. If we get to 2,000 by the end of June, that will be good, and the bulk will most probably continue to be caught from Carham upwards, unless it becomes drier when the lower beats might begin to come into play.
But, there are none so foolish as those who make salmon fishing predictions.
I do so, even laden with caveats, with the greatest reluctance.
For all we know a large shoal of springers is, even now, massing off the coast, waiting for that biting east wind to veer westerly and stop churning up the sand, so that they can comfortably run into fresh water.
The stuff of dreams maybe, but….you never know.
our twitter feed