news/editorial

3 June 2018 News/Editorial

At last some water, after thunderstorms mid-river on both Friday and Saturday.

It is not much, but better than nothing. A mixture of thick tomato and mulligatawny soups, it could take until Wednesday to clear completely.

If the theorists are right and the main salmon run is now to be a summer one, then the timing of this water could hardly be better as we enter the first full week of June.

Last week fizzled out amongst increasing heat and humidity, and the score of 46 salmon and 8 sea trout was as much as could be expected, with water temperature soaring into the 60sF and river levels shrinking below anything seen in 2017.

The cumulative totals of rod catches to 2nd June 2018 have reached (within 90% accuracy) 643 salmon and 62 sea trout.

The forecast for next week is for more fine weather, if less hot than last week, in theory providing better conditions for rod fishing as the river settles and clears.

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Last Monday was glorious, and despite being a Bank Holiday, I had spent much of it inside, at meetings.

And so it came to pass that, late in the evening, around 9.15pm, when the heat had gone and all was cool and quiet, I wandered out to sit beside the river, down to just above our cauld where there is a most comfortable bench dedicated to “Distillery Dave” from his former (sadly the “distillery” bit giving the game away as to the cause of his untimely demise) fishing friends.

All was calm, the light going, a complete full moon in the southeastern sky, the Temple Pool like a millpond, and the heron picking off the odd smolt if one came too close to the side of the cauld. Smolts had been running steadily for weeks already, very visible in the increasingly low and clear conditions which have prevailed since the middle of April. .

And then I noticed the procession, never have I seen anything quite like it before.

Posses of them, 1,000s and 1,000s of smolts, the myriad dimples in the smooth water, each party about maybe 10 to 12 feet in diameter, one after the other, party after party, some veering towards the dry edges of the cauld before somehow sensing the flow towards the 30ft gap in the middle…..and through they went, no hesitation at all, down into the churning waters of the Cauld Stream…..and away.

I sat there for half an hour, mesmerised by what I was seeing, of course I have seen smolts migrating before, but never quite such a massive procession…. and I had forgotten how quickly they went. From the moment I spotted each party, by those myriad dimples, about 50 yards upstream, until they went through the cauld about 50 yards downstream, cannot have taken more than 2 minutes.

Those smolts were on a mission, and despite evidence from elsewhere that caulds hold up smolts, let me tell you that, from what I saw that evening, nothing, but nothing, could be further from the truth.

Every party, and I must have watched 20+, went straight through the middle of the “slap”, that 30 foot gap in the cauld, without any hesitation whatsoever.

They never gave it a second thought, or look.

At the rate they were going, and with a full moon shining, I would not be surprised if those smolts would be in the sea by sometime early on Tuesday morning.

Malcolm texted me the next evening (I had been on a course) saying “1,000s of smolts” so clearly the extraordinary migration I had seen the evening before had continued unabated right through Tuesday.

Now, of course, you pro-hatchery buffs would expect me to make a point here, and it is simply this.

I wish you had been sitting beside me on “Distillery Dave’s” seat that evening to see it all.

But then you were probably theorising in your armchair somewhere, glass in hand, about how useless river managers are and how you, personally, could put every river in Scotland right, at a stroke, by building a hatchery, or salmon ranching, or some other unnatural quasi-factory process.

And another thing.

There was neither a cormorant, nor a goosander, in sight.

One day most of you will come to think, like me, that the real problems for those smolts would have come sometime on Tuesday morning……

…..when they reached the sea.

They will need a lot of luck to make it back.

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And finally, see www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-May-The-River-Issue-3.pdf for the 3rd (May 2018) issue from Tweed River Management of “The River”, this time about historic cycles of salmon run timings, all the more interesting as most of the cognoscenti think we are now in transition from one cycle (grilse and late running salmon) to another (fewer grilse and earlier (not autumn) running salmon).

It is well worth a read.