news/editorial

8 July 2018 News/Editorial

After yet another boiling week, Tweed salmon fishing has all but ceased. The river is at, or even below, summer level, and the afternoon water temperatures down here at Coldstream are consistently in the mid 70sF.

Just 27 salmon and 5 sea trout were caught last week, making 1,030 salmon and 254 sea trout for the year to date.

Not only has salmon fishing all but ceased here, but everywhere else in Scotland, so severe has been the drought, and so extreme the heat.

At a time when salmon numbers in Scotland are low anyway, it is a pretty disastrous situation for everyone connected with the salmon fishing industry; fishermen and women for spoiling their annual Scottish fishing holidays; ghillies and boatmen for having endless poor, even blank, fishing weeks to endure; proprietors for now (most probably) having a fifth poor fishing year in a row; and tackle shops, hotels, restaurants, B&Bs, self catering accommodation, petrol stations...you name it…. because they are financially much worse off, some in vulnerable, often remote, rural communities, for what has been happening to our salmon fishing of late.

Is it a crisis?

Well, if not….. it is not far from it.

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Of all the myriad theories about what is going wrong with our salmon in the sea, Dr Jens Christian Holst’s paper on the effects of the mackerel explosion, and consequent over grazing in the North Atlantic, is an especially compelling one.

Here it is on the Lochy website; at 34 pages it is well worth reading. You can move through the pages by clicking on the (invisible!) bar at the bottom of each page.

http://riverlochy.com/general-information/salmon-mackerel-balance-tipped/

Of most interest, Dr Holst disagrees that any of this has anything to do with sea warming (since 2007 temperatures have been declining and are now around historic norms for the North Atlantic).

In addition, he has a very fundamental disagreement with ICES as to the size of mackerel stocks; he thinks it could be over 10 million tonnes as opposed to their figure of 3.1 million tonnes.

If he is right, next time you go sea fishing….

…... you should catch and kill as many mackerel as you possibly can.

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Slightly against my better judgement, for in matters fishy I have come to distrust conclusions born of angler observation alone, I have been forced to agree that something very serious has happened to our brown trout numbers.

The Temple Pool was, until recently, a mecca for big brown trout and I mean big, wild brownies of 2, 3 even 4 lbs being not uncommon. Not easy to catch, even for the experts in the flat calm waters of a summer’s evening, the whole pool used to be ringed with rising fish. Even duffers like yours truly could catch them in numbers, on a dry fly, just after a summer flood, with some colour still in the water.

On a sunny morning like today, with the light just right, you could see these big brownies from the high Temple bank, as they cruised about looking for their next meal.

I have just been out looking for them.

There is nothing there, not a fish to be seen, and instead of 100s of evening rising trout in the warm gloaming of a summer’s evening, you now see a few…..but very few.

Ghillies Malcolm and Paul have videos of 100s of cormorants taking off from the Temple Pool as they arrived for work of a spring or autumn morning. Those cormorants could have been there since dawn, having breakfast.

How many trout would 100 cormorants eat in an hour of undisturbed fishing just after dawn?

I have come to accept that they are the culprits. We have only had these flocks for the last few years and, since they appeared, our trout numbers, from consistent observation of the evidence, have plummeted.

Malcolm and I both used to wander out in the evening to try to outwit those big Temple brown trout.

Neither of us has been out this year, despite the perfect warm evenings.

Because there is little or nothing there to catch.