news/editorial

6 November 2016 News/Editorial

Not wishing to heap Pelion on Ossa for the Tweed and its fish, and whilst those who are unlucky enough to play golf with me know that I am, by nature, distinctly “glass half empty”, for some reason I cannot be too pessimistic, or even at all pessimistic, about Tweed’s fishy future.

This unusual lack of doom-laden predictions for Tweed comes, I think, from having been over the jumps a few times.

Aged 66, not old you might say, but very nearly a biblical lifespan, and whilst I might not have seen it all before, I have seen quite a bit of it.

I was here, in every sense of the word, between 1960 and 1967. Blessed with long school holidays, I saw at first hand the trauma of going from the land of plenty, of never ending angling sunshine and joy up to 1966, to the almost unimaginable horror of 1967, of helping to stack dead (UDN) fish into the lime pit at Carham, a mass piscatorial grave.

I recall looking over Kelso bridge to see salmon in their 100s lying below it, all very visible either because they had fungus growing down their backs, or because they had the telltale white spot on their heads, for it always began there, in the middle of their foreheads, often burrowing a deep hole right through their skulls.

It seemed that every salmon in the river that late March/April was infected. They did not all die, but not far from it, and those that made it until the water temperature exceeded 45F, late that April, so long as the fungus had not developed on their backs, did recover, albeit every one you caught after that had a healed over scar on its head.

The rod catch never got above 6,500, mainly well under that, for the next 15 years.

It was a long road to recovery in rod catches.

There is irony in that by far the biggest killer of our Scottish salmon in 1967 was the North East of England coastal fishery which, that same year, found they could operate better and catch many more of our salmon, by using monofilament netting.

Can you imagine the outcry now if, the same year that most of our salmon died of UDN, the main human killer of salmon found an even more efficient way of killing those that were left before they even got to their native rivers to spawn?

Between 1970 and 1976, in the recovery period from UDN and 1967, that North East fishery declared an annual average catch of 55,000 salmon, over 90% in the Northumbrian area, over 90% in the drift net (monofilament) fishery, and, most importantly, well before the Tyne became once again a major salmon fishery, the vast majority of these 55,000 came from Scottish rivers, at a time when they could least afford to lose them. Tagging showed that 32% of that 55,000 declared catch came from the Tweed and 20% from the Tay.

Tweed’s own net fishery, still vibrant in the 1970s, declared a not untypical 30,000 salmon caught and killed in 1977.

That these massive figures of 55,000 and 30,000 are both under-declarations in themselves cannot be seriously doubted. In the drift net buy out negotiations of 2003, one longstanding drift net skipper is reported to have said he never declared more than 1 in 7 of what he actually caught, and then, of course, there was a large coastal and in-river poaching industry in those days, accounting for countless more mortalities.

Is there any wonder that recovery in rod catches took until the early 1980s, and mainly in the autumn, post 15th September, once all the coastal and in-river netting had ceased.

So why the unaccustomed optimism now in 2016, just as another change would seem to be happening?

Because we now have no poaching or in-river netting to speak of, and because the North East fishery catches (only!) 15,000 salmon, a true figure now that carcass tagging is mandatory in England. And, of course, the drift net fishery element of that 15,000 will disappear completely by 2022.

Any concerns I now have are not about recovery per se, but about the timing of future recovery (how long will it take and will it be in spring, summer or even back to autumn?) and how to weather/manage the transition?

With an average rod catch now of 8,000 pa (it was as low as 4,000 post 1967), with hugely reduced netting compared to the 1960s, and with almost no poaching, recovery could/should be quicker.

“Glass half empty” after just 3 poor-ish years on Tweed?

Would you be if you had seen the devastation of 1967?

Not me.

XooX

It cannot have escaped the attention of those who look at graphs, that the UDN disaster of 1967 came after a crescendo of improving Tweed rod catches from 1957 to 1966, mainly in the spring but increasingly, from 1962 to 1966, in the autumn as well.

It came immediately after several years of bonanza catches.

With a background of unprecedented rod catches since 2003, averaging a massive 16,000 in the 5 years from 2009-2013, at the start of 2014, nobody was predicting anything other than more of the same.

With the (comparative) crash in rod catches of 2014, 2015 and (now) 2016, the annual rod caught average has reduced to 8,000, exactly half what it had been.

Why is it that both the 1967 and 2014 shocks came immediately after so many years of plenty?

Is there some self correcting mechanism out there when spawning numbers get too high (whatever too high means)?

Fanciful, for sure….. but it is odd.

Xoox

And finally, it amuses me how the arguments change when salmon runs do not meet our expectations.

Now it is those mythical vast Russian trawlers (blame Putin for everything), goosanders, seals and other predators (but we had them in the bonanza years), something at sea (there is always “something” at sea), smolts dying as they transition from fresh to saltwater (haven’t they always?) or lack of a hatchery.

Ah, whereas it used to be the nets’ fault it, nowadays it usually comes down to “lack of a hatchery.”

Listen to the words of “The Master”, WL Calderwood writing in 1930, on the subject of netting and hatcheries.

“But if the river should be one where (say) the nets catch 45,000 or 50,000 fish, and the rods about 2,000, it would be an equally profitable business to buy the release of a few hundred fish than go to the trouble of erecting hatcheries and keeping a staff of men to net, strip and hatch.”

In other words, take off some of the nets and you don’t need a hatchery

It will astound readers that pre the 2nd War there were 80+ registered Tweed netting stations, post War there were 60, less than 10 post the first big buy-out in 1987…..and now there is…. just one.

You can see that the chances of quick recovery for the rod fisheries, now as compared to the past, are a lot better.

The Tweed has done exactly what WL Calderwood said we should.

And a lot more.