news/editorial

3 November 2019 News/Editorial

The Tweed rod catch scores last week were 199 salmon and 34 sea trout, bringing the running totals to 2nd November 2019 to 5,645 salmon and 1,893 sea trout.

With the river big and dirty as I write, “unsettled” sums up the forecast for the week ahead, with rain forecast for Monday and Thursday in particular. It seems sure to be one of those difficult weeks.

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The absence of big fish appears to have been corrected at Drygrange (34lbs and 31lbs) and Fairnilee (31lbs) in recent days.

I feel sorry for those who have caught them, for unless they have been weighed, it is all guess and estimation, with consequent disbelief by others. Photographs are worse than useless, they will tell you it was a big fish, almost always a big old cock fish, but little more than that.

Old bores like me tell such stories as the one of two big fish in my freezer in the 1980s. Both were fresh October cock fish. One was 26lbs and the other 31lbs, both properly weighed. The longer one of the two, by two inches, was the 26lber. So often both the girth and the flesh consistency are the deciding factors, but understandably ignored in estimations.

There is no substitute for weighing, which is why, oddly, I now dread catching one (probably) over 30lbs. If you kill it, you find out for sure what it weighs, but you then get stick from all and sundry, the pc police in particular. If you do not kill it, and have no built-in weigh net, nobody will believe you. Indeed, even you can never be sure.

Elder brother Simon, in the 1980s, caught three big cock fish in the same week, convinced they were all over 30lbs he killed them (we did in those days) to have smoked. To his frustration, in the order in which he caught them, they were 27lbs, 28lbs and 29lbs. To this day, he has never caught a 30lber. I imagine nowadays all three might, depending on by whom and where they were caught, go down as 30lbs+, for they would all now be released, unweighed.

Luckily the only 30lber caught by yours truly was before the pc police, people like me, were rampant. Killed and weighed, Ronnie Glass made two exceptionally fine casts, one of which is in our hut and the other my wife, reluctantly, allows to be on show, discreetly where you can hardly see it, in our house.

So what to do if you catch one you think is over 30lbs, it is after 1st July so legally you can kill it, you have no weigh net and, if you release it, you will never, ever, discover its true weight? Maybe none of us will know how we will react until we are in that position. Does it matter if it is just under or just over 30lbs? Probably not. But rather oddly, it does.

Ask my brother.

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Most of us assume that there is a tendency to overestimate weights, and for the most part that is (anecdotally, of course) correct. However, not always.

I have been reminded of a most particular, and singular, incident here some years ago. Paul was rowing one of our tenant’s guests, Mr Henry Lax, in our Cauld Stream. It was early November. After a long struggle, they landed a sea-liced cock fish. It was big, really big.

Laudably and selflessly, the advice from Mr Lax, who had caught even bigger fish in Norway, was to release it. Paul did as instructed, but only after carefully measuring it with his own (every ghillie should have one) measuring tape. It was 49 inches long.

On the chart, it comes in at well over over 40lbs (the chart only goes up to 48 inches=42.8lbs). After much discussion, the conclusion was to put it in the book at 35lbs, in order to err on the very safe side. Paul says he has only ever seen a salmon that size once before, when working on the nets. That one was 45lbs.

In his view, Mr Lax’s fish was also over 40 lbs.

But the records will never show that.