news/editorial

6 September 2015 News/Editorial

If last week’s effort erred on the pessimistic side following a lack lustre August on the Tweed, with the sun shining out of a piercing blue autumn sky as I write, hardly good fishing weather, it might seem perverse to go the other way this time.

“On what evidence? “ I hear you cry, as another rainless week beckons with the now customary September high pressure (it did this in both 2013 and 2014) remaining stubbornly positioned right over the UK.

We need rain, unless you are fishing around Norham.

Perceptive score watchers will have noticed that the Horncliffe beat, just off the tide below Norham, caught 9 on Saturday. We know that other big rivers are doing well, the Spey in particular with the Brae Water averaging nearly 30 a day for the last few days and many other Spey beats doing hugely better than the unexplained disappointments of 2014. The mighty Tay has fished consistently well all year and even the Dee, after a poor spring, has begun to pick up.

Then I also hear that the smaller northern rivers, the Naver, the Helmsdale and the Findhorn have all been doing well, the Findhorn last week recording extraordinary numbers at (arguably) the best two beats, Lethen and Glenferness, with some daily scores into the teens and one day of 20 at Glenferness, followed by 18 the next day.

These are big figures and quite late, I would have thought, for these northern rivers, whose runs traditionally happen at least a month, if not 6 weeks, before the Tweed.

This is all in stark contrast to 2014 when, despite masses of water following the fallout of Hurricane Bertha, these northern rivers were almost fishless.

So here is the “glass half full” theory for the Tweed.

We know from Southampton University that the AMO (Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation….keep up please, I wrote about this back in May, if you were paying attention) has begun to shift North Atlantic sea surface temperatures into a cooling pattern (as it last did in the 1960s to 1980s). This could lead to even further delayed runs of salmon into our rivers, something that seems to have been happening for some time now, with grilse appearing later and later.

If big runs of salmon and grilse are still, in early September, entering more northern rivers, we should reasonably expect the same to apply here on the Tweed, but a month to 6 weeks later, in October or even early November

So the poor August here, referred to last week, could indeed, so the theory goes, just be a matter of delayed timing, not an indicator of anything more fundamental.

We will find out soon enough, but for anglers above Coldstream, it will produce meaningful results only when we get rain….

and that all too elusive flood.