news/editorial

5 March 2017 News/Editorial

The River Tweed Commission (RTC) has just published the salmon and grilse catches for 2016, being 7,680 for the rods, and 541 by the nets. If I read the table of past catches correctly, this is the worst rod catch since 1984, all of 32 years ago.

Of the 7,680 rod total, 2,464 were caught before 30th June and 5,216 after 1st July. 85% of the rod catch was returned, the highest return rate ever recorded here.

The Spey, by far the closest river to the Tweed in terms of numbers caught, had 7,632 in 2016 by rod, of which nearly 4,000 were caught before 30th June, 60% more than the Tweed. With a much shorter season, there can be little doubt that the Spey would have caught many more than the Tweed in 2016, if it also fished for 10 months.

Tweed nets caught 541 salmon and grilse, very similar to 2015. Of more concern, is that some of the net killed fish were springers. It remains to be seen if the Gardo net seeks to start catching and killing springers before 16th June this year, in contempt of the RTC’s spring conservation policy. It was only the public outcry which stopped them in 2016, when they started netting and killing salmon long before the agreed start date, for nets, of 16th June.

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After a second week largely ruined by floods, it was a pleasant surprise to see one of the Junction rods catching a springer on a fly on Friday, just before lunch.

I was working (unusually) in Kelso, directly opposite where they caught it, just below the Teviot joining the Tweed, and I spied the action out of the meeting room window, all the while trying to concentrate on the business agenda.

Despite the river still being big on Friday, 11 springers were caught, which just could be a sign of better times ahead, if only the river will settle, and the rain stop falling.

Good fishing springs usually show their hand in the second half of March, but we will only know for sure, one way or the other, when water levels drop to a good height.

The forecast for the coming week remains unsettled.

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Politics is not really a subject for this column, but for those of us living in Scotland, the ever present threat of another independence referendum is something we have all learnt to live with, day in, day out, whether you want such a second referendum or not.

I was struck by the following short passage in Sir Walter Scott’s “Heart of Midlothian”, written almost exactly 200 years ago….in my view his best novel after “Rob Roy”.

It goes like this:

“His (the Duke of Argyle’s) native Scotland stood at this time (the 1730s) in a precarious and doubtful situation. She was indeed united to England, but the cement had not yet acquired consistence. The irritant memory of ancient wrongs subsisted and betwixt the fretful jealousy of the Scots and the supercilious disdain of the English, quarrels repeatedly occurred. In the course of these, the Union, so important to the safety of both, was in danger of being dissolved. Scotland also had the disadvantage of being bitterly divided into factions, which waited only for a signal to break forth into action.”

Whether some Scots still think of the English as displaying “supercilious disdain”, and some English think the Scots display “fretful jealousy”, I leave up to you to decide, but I suspect neither is very far from the mark.

Scott wrote this 200 years ago with reference to a period 80 years before that, but over that 200-300 years it would seem that, depressingly, nothing much has changed.

We wait for those ancient, and still very current, divisions “to break forth into action” yet again, once Ms Sturgeon gives the “signal”.

If she does, it will be a very sad, regrettable and, worst of all, deliberately divisive day.

Of progress in Scotland’s attitude towards the Union with England, over 300 years, there appears to have been none.

We are as divided now as we were then….. on the Union at least.

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