news/editorial

31 March 2019 News/Editorial

One of the benefits of William Younger’s hard work in keeping a running tally of the salmon and sea trout catches for the last two years, is that we can now contrast and compare. With 66 salmon and 10 sea trout caught last week, these are the Tweed’s figures to the end of March:

2019 salmon 246

2018 salmon 190

2019 sea trout 30

2018 sea trout 23

Thus far 2019 is running quite well ahead of 2018, but one doubts if you could call the difference in absolute numbers, if not in percentages, statistically significant. Some will try to call “the beast from the east” of 2018 as a mitigation for the poorer numbers last year. So it might be, but we have lost the best part of 3 weeks to flooding thus far in 2019, despite the amazingly benign winter.

So far nobody could possibly say there are a lot of spring fish in the river. This can change quickly, and those who have bet good money that “2019 could not possibly be worse than 2018” are still well in the game.

2019 could yet surprise us all.

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As one does at my age, I got talking to an old friend the other day about whether we have seen the best of it. That could apply to anything. Those of us over pension age, pre, during or post war baby boomers, have been lucky, very lucky.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to salmon.

He recalled going to fish on 1st February in the 1950s or early 1960s, it doesn’t really matter which; it was freezing, so cold that nobody else wanted to go anywhere near it, and every three or four casts he had to unfreeze the line from the rings on his rod. He caught ten sparkling bright salmon and four or five more kelts. He killed the salmon, as we did in those days. They were days of plenty and we thought it would never end, or, more accurately, we never thought about it at all. If you said “catch and release” to anyone, they would not have the first clue what on earth you were talking about.

The fishmonger’s van would come round all the main Tweed salmon beats before lunch and pick up the previous day’s catch. Everything that could not be eaten was sold. As late as the 1970s, I remember this happening on the Spey at Knockando, and famously that great salmon fisher, John Ashley-Cooper and his friends took Rothes on the Spey throughout the 1950s and 1960s in April, and always paid the rent by selling what they caught.

Such nostalgic conversations can become maudlin, but the serious point we were trying to focus on is whether indeed we have seen the best of it, or in other words, will those days of plenty which we old timers bang on about, ever return for our children and their children to enjoy?

We were gloomy about the prospects of that, while at the same time recognising that man is never fully content, and certainly never able to recognise the good times for what they are. 2010 was the perfect example of that; the Tweed caught over 23,000 salmon and grilse that year by rod and line, more than any North Atlantic river anywhere (Iceland, Norway, Russia, USA , you name it) had ever caught before, two or three times more than were ever caught on the Tweed in the 1950s and 1960s, and yet anglers obsessed about the lack of springers and the small size of grilse. We had to call a public meeting in the Cross Keys in Kelso to pacify them.

But there is a trend that is not good.

If you adjust for the tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of salmon killed by the nets in those days of old, and still there were plenty for the rods to catch, the sobering fact is that the total salmon population now is a fraction of what it was. We can all obsess about predators, but serious commentators would point at something much more fundamental. The salmon is a cold water species in a warming world, and the further south you go in the UK, let alone to Northern Spain or Western France, the more the salmon rivers there are struggling. In the 1960s and early 1970s, I and others caught plenty of salmon on the Wye. Will it ever get back to the numbers of salmon it had in those days, or is the sheer heat, of the southern UK rivers and their surrounding seas, itself the problem?

The optimists will say that, if we are heading for unprecedented times of ever warming North Atlantic sea temperatures, the salmon has been around, and has survived, for millennia despite what successive climate changes have thrown at them. In other words, salmon will adapt. The pessimists are more sanguine; they find it impossible to see those southern UK salmon rivers returning to anything like their potency of the first 60 years of the last century, they might survive as salmon rivers, but maybe only just, simply because it is so much hotter than it was when Robert Pashley was catching his thousands of salmon on the Wye in the 1900s to 1950s.

The further north you go, the more likely the rivers are to prosper, and maybe we are already seeing that in those far northern Scottish rivers, Naver, Thurso and Halladale, all being pretty much immune, so far, from the dramatically reduced salmon runs their more southerly neighbours have experienced over the last five years?

As for the Tweed, being neither far north nor far south, we are somewhere in between, but anyone witnessing the massively high water temperatures of last summer, and the prevalence of exceptionally mild winters, would be concerned. In particular, the salmon’s eggs need cold water (preferably well under 10c) to hatch successfully.

Earnestly hoping to be wrong, I am with the pessimists. Reminiscing about the salmon we used to catch fifty years ago, perhaps my old friend and I really have seen the best of it, or at least until the northern hemisphere cools down again.

If you have the time, and want to be astonished, please read a short extract about Robert Pashley on the Wye in the following link https://www.anglingheritage.org/p-21660-pashleys-correspondence-about-the-wye.aspx

You will find it almost impossible to believe that Mr Pashley’s great, or maybe great great, grandson, were he to be a keen angler and fishing 100 years later in the 2040s, will have anything approaching the extraordinary success that his ancestor had in the 1940s.

We like to think we can leave this world a better place than we found it. Despite all our efforts on their behalf, in the salmon world at least, that looks increasingly unlikely for my generation. Maybe the salmon will just have to struggle on, as they appear to be now, in the doldrums, until the world is a lot colder.

Which could take some time.