6 May 2018 News/Editorial
The score for last week was 53 salmon and 6 sea trout, making a total for the season to 5th May 2018 a well below par 423 salmon and 40 sea trout.
We have lurched from cold, windy and unsettled conditions into cloudless skies, gentle breezes and heat, all in the blinking of an eye. If there are fish to come, which even the most pessimistic must think there will be soon, as water levels drop away, the lower beats below Kelso, even Coldstream, are the most likely to benefit.
But then predicting anything this year is a mug’s game.
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Which brings us to the North East Drift Net Fishery (NEDNF).
You, like me, were thinking that one of the few certainties, as consistently trailed by the Environment Agency over recent months, is that the drift netters would not be fishing/ killing salmon in 2018, followed by the T&J netters in 2019.
We were all wrong…..or at least about 2018. Who knows about 2019?
The drift netters will operate as usual from 1st June 2018 for the whole 3 month season up to 31st August 2018.
We may never know the truth as to how this could possibly have happened…..but it has.
It is hard to imagine that the words “cock up” are not involved somewhere, most probably because the drift netsmen’s lawyers have successfully challenged the EA processes, and found them wanting. The reasons we are given, when finally it is announced, are unlikely to be the real ones.
I have been corresponding with one of the drift netsmen, who told me last Wednesday that “he had yesterday received a phone call advising that the EA were unable to proceed with the bye law change this year”….so that he would be netting as normal. He is even now busy getting his boat ready for action from 1st June.
You will be disappointed...to put it mildly…..that, yet again, the Northumbrian nets will be killing many 1,000s of our increasingly scarce salmon, “our” salmon because we know from genetic studies carried out on those caught, that up to 75% of the drift net fish, and up to 50% of the T&J net fish, come not from England, but from Scotland.
In effect, Scotland is producing, and paying for, the salmon which the NE netsmen catch and for which they pay nothing, yes nothing and never have, to the Scottish rivers.
I am not at all into “grievance” politics, unlike a depressingly large proportion of the Scottish electorate who blame England/Westminster for everything, but this is a longstanding iniquity about which we on the Tweed, by far the most affected river in Scotland, feel especially strongly. So, barring some last minute change, my netsman correspondent will be in business for another season.
He has a living to make, and from what he has, most passionately, said in his emails, he loves what he does, and will fight tooth and nail to keep it going for as long as possible.
I do not blame him one jot, and if I were he, I would most likely do the same.
He kindly asked me to join him on a netting trip post 1st June, to see what he does, which I declined because I simply could not take seeing all those beautiful, probably mainly Tweed, fish dying/being killed before they could get back to their river of choice.
He loves what he does, we love our river; he wants to go on netting, we find it hard to forgive the damage which indiscriminate interceptory netting does at a time when salmon stock are (arguably) at an all time low.
Maybe one day he and I will meet, and talk about it all.
But only after he has stopped killing our fish…..and then he, understandably, may not want to speak to any of us.
In 2019?
Well, maybe.
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I did a bit of fishing and some ghillieing (see Malcolm’s blog for the full story of an unlucky half hour with yours truly at the oars) on Saturday.
It was a glorious day, a total of 4 hours spent on the river, and everywhere you could see the telltale dimples, in the surface of the water, of migrating smolts.
Late in the evening, there was a heron standing on the cauld, stock-still, waiting to spear a passing smolt.
I am no friend of our goosander and cormorant friends, quite the opposite, but of them there was to be seen…. not one feather.
Which is good for the smolts.
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