7 April 2019 News/Editorial
40 salmon and 8 sea trout were caught last week, bringing the season’s totals to 286 salmon and 38 sea trout to 6th April 2019.
As another poor-ish fishing week goes by, largely thanks to flooding, it was frustrating for everyone, especially the unlucky fishers who missed out.
With no east winds all winter, just as it should get warmer, April has brought stiff, cold, persistent easterlies which can last for weeks. The forecasting consensus seems to be for another week of cold before those welcome westerlies try to reassert themselves at the weekend.
But at least it should be dry, bar the horrible east coast mizzle and gloom, for most of next week, allowing the river to settle.
--00--
Welcome to the Tweed’s very own version of Brexit, or “is there anything about spinning on which all Tweed proprietors can agree?”.
When the RTC applied to change the netting weekly close time, because Gardo net refused to comply with the RTC’s request not to kill spring salmon between 1st April and 31st May, little did anyone think that the Government would agree to that, but only with the proviso, it seems, that the rods could not spin until 1st June (instead of 15th February).
Let us go back a step.
Was the RTC right to seek to stop the nets killing spring salmon? The answer has to be an emphatic “yes”. By way of confirmation, 2018 saw one of the lowest ever spring rod catches of 1,083 salmon, so indicating (at a catch rate of maximum 40% for spring fish) a total early running salmon population concerningly low at around 2,500 to 3,000. Support for such a critically low estimate was provided by Ettrick’s new counter which had its lowest figure of just over 1,000 salmon going through it in 2018, a figure that used to be up in the 3000s, 4,000s or 5,000s ten years ago.
Based on these figures alone, it is impossible to criticise the RTC for seeking to stop anybody killing springers, so they were absolutely right to confront Gardo’s intransigence head on, and ask the Government to change the law. Had they not done that, you could argue they would have been in breach of their statutory duty under the Tweed Order 2006, Scotland Act 1998.
Where did the idea to ban spinning for the rods until after 31st May come from? No doubt from a certain amount of lobbying during the consultation period from the netsmen, seeking a sort of quid pro quo, but also, of course, because the Tweed netting close season and a ban on spinning has always been aligned in the legislation. It was an easy one to implement for the Government. Government also thinks it has figures which show that spinning results in more casualties than fly fishing, another “fact” hotly disputed by some.
Now the RTC has written to all main stem proprietors seeking information on how many salmon they catch spinning, and what they think about the Government’s proposal? The upshot will most probably be to open up a rift, to the extent that it is not there already, between those beats that spin a lot and those who hardly spin at all.
Some might question whether all the beats that catch a lot of salmon spinning will give the correct information? Turkeys never vote for Christmas, and admitting, for the first time, how many they catch spinning might prove testing. Now that so few salmon (comparatively) are caught post 15th September when it is fly only, for those beats that spin right through the summer, their percentage catch by spinning could be high, up to and maybe over 50%.
Behind every effort by the rods to restrict netting for conservation reasons, there has been an unspoken, and only reluctantly admitted by many rods, glaringly obvious conflict of interest, which is that the fewer salmon the nets kill, not only will more salmon run up the river, but the rods will catch more. The rods have always been thus conflicted, something that has often been pointed out by the netsmen. Is the motive in seeking to reduce netting really conservation, or is it so that they, the rods, can catch more? As “both” is the correct answer, nothing could be more demonstrative of a fundamental conflict of interest.
More than once I have received furious comments from netsmen, as a result of what is said in these pages about netting, saying “how dare you/rods moralise about the nets, when in the summer the rods are lining the banks of the Tweed in low water, spinning upstream for fish that are stuck in the pools, and then they kill some of those fish when if we, the nets, kill them there are howls of protest”.
You can see how it looks, and then the rods scream with outrage if anyone tries to impose any restrictions on them.
My position is, by now, well known, liked and disliked in equal measure.
In 2018 we caught one salmon here spinning, we banned all upstream spinning many years ago and downstream spinning is restricted to high water conditions only. It would not worry me one jot if spinning were banned altogether, and every year I breathe a sigh of relief when 15th September comes along. But there are many who disagree, who think that any restriction on spinning is commercial suicide, despite never having claimed the same for the autumn post 15th September. It is a curious form of “suicide”, because a number of beats have been guilty of it, and happily survived, for many years.
In a nutshell, sadly the two sides within the RTC and the Tweed proprietors are unlikely to agree.
Just like Brexit.
our twitter feed