news/editorial

5 May 2019 News/Editorial

Tweed’s salmon catch last week was surprisingly good, given the very low water conditions throughout.

100 salmon and 10 seatrout were landed, making the cumulative totals to 4th May for the 2019 season 613 salmon and 66 sea trout. To the same time in 2018, the figures were 423 salmon and 40 seatrout (both years’ figures within 90% accuracy).

This makes 2019, so far, quite distinctly better than last year, for both salmon and sea trout.

Which is encouraging.

As for next week, there just could be some much needed rain from Wednesday, if it doesn’t stick to a predicted more southerly path.

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Andrew Flitcroft, of Trout & Salmon magazine, has written an unusually defensive editor’s letter in the June issue, just published. Somebody (not me!) has “got at him” about the two pages of “Gallery” photographs of successful anglers holding their catches, almost all out of the water, for the camera.

He is, of course, conflicted, because he publishes these photos to fill his pages and, one assumes, thereby sell more copies, which some would argue is an encouragement to anglers to hold the fish they catch out of the water, for the camera, longer than they otherwise would. He calls his critics, somewhat unkindly, in this regard, “keyboard warriors” and “the sanctimonious few”.

He says he will go on publishing pictures of “young Johnnie or Josie...with his or her first salmon”, and quite right too, but any pictures of a likely “young Johnnie or Josie” are singularly lacking on pages 12 & 13 of the June issue. The preponderance of greying hair tells the story.

Peculiarly missing also from what he writes is any comment on the effects on fish of prolonged exposure to the air; in other words, most of the pictures, not all, are, in my view, just about ok but crucially depending on how long the fish were held like that, anything more than 5 seconds being unacceptable. Hold it under water, and take it out for a few seconds (fewer than 5) just for the picture, then back in the water for good. Better still, never take it out of the water at all.

But how many of those, whose pictures are on pages 12 & 13 of the June issue, have behaved like that? Neither you, I nor Andrew Flitcroft have any idea. I am not being a spoilsport, nor are river managers, such as the RTC and other river boards, whose legal responsibility it is to protect and preserve salmon stocks. It is just that the whole point of catch and release is both (a) to allow anglers to enjoy the sport of angling and (b) to ensure the safe onward journey, because it is a scarce resource, of what you catch. Prolonged exposure to air to take a photo is in direct conflict with that latter (b) principle, and therefore it is entirely valid to question whether T&S should be publishing its “Gallery”, which shows little other than fish out of the water?

In human terms, it is like a photographer taking a picture of you with the slightly uncomfortable preamble “now smile for the camera and I hope you don’t mind if I stick your head underwater for some time to take the photo, but you’ll be fine, and by the way, you are going to have nothing to eat for the next 6 months either”.

Overly anthropomorphic? Well perhaps, but only if you observe the 5 seconds rule as a minimum. I think we do that with any pictures taken here of salmon caught, but it does no harm to remind ourselves constantly of our duty of care. We can all slip up.

Has Andrew Flitcroft’s slightly tetchy article in T&S, aimed at the person/people who “get at him” about the T&S Gallery pages, helped the cause of salmon survival post release? It has not, and maybe those Gallery pages are, indeed, complicit in encouraging unnecessary damage to the survival prospects of our precious and depressingly few, especially spring, salmon.

However much the T&S editor might protest both his own and his magazine’s innocence, and, in the process, be disappointingly less than generous to his perfectly justified critics.

Instead, he should be saying “you’ve got a point” and only publish pictures from now on where the fish is not lifted out of the water at all, because for all the others you have no idea how long the fish has been in the air. It is a question of whether T&S puts the wellbeing of the fish first, or its own circulation numbers.

So far, the circulation numbers seem to be winning.