8 March 2020 News/Editorial
A better week last week, fish were caught, often in three’s, a sign of fish starting to come through in small batches, so that the total score might be “around about” 40-50 salmon and a few sea trout for the 2020 season to date.
Despite earlier indications of these incessant storms abating, forecasters are now saying “not yet”, so that whilst wind and rain will continue next week, the direction will veer more northwesterly, cooler but drier, from mid week.
With the river up today (Sunday), and with more rain forecast for Monday and Tuesday, who knows when it will settle?
And so the frustrations of salmon fishing will continue, it seems, in the short term at least.
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The Tweed rods in 2019 returned 86% of what they caught, or in other words they killed 14% of 6,382 salmon. That is 879 dead salmon, and if you could see all of those 879 dead fish, lined up, at a time when some say the Atlantic salmon is in existential crisis, suddenly that 86% return rate loses a bit of its gloss.
What of other rivers?
Controversially, the Tay Board is proposing full 100% catch and release in 2020 for the first time, despite just 52% of owners voting for it.
The Dee habitually returns 99.5% of what it catches.
The Spey last year not only caught more salmon than the Tweed between 1st February and 30th September 2019, which is the end of its season, but it returned 98%, killing just 115 salmon out of the 5,090 total (from which we can deduce that the rods killed none on purpose, 115 being the sort of number that would die accidentally and could not be revived).
All of which raises some potentially damaging PR issues for the Tweed.
Will we be the only one of the four big Scottish east coast rivers deliberately killing any salmon in 2020? Will we be killing more salmon on the Tweed in 2020, not just than the other three big rivers together, but even more than the total of all the other salmon rivers in Scotland added together?
The Tweed could go from being in the vanguard of those conserving our Atlantic salmon, and consistently campaigning to reduce the impact of our own inriver and coastal nets, and, for decades past, to seeking a ban to the indiscriminate netting off the Northumberland coast, to being itself the single biggest killer of Atlantic salmon in the whole of the UK.
We are already after 2019, almost certainly, in that, some would say, invidious position, even more so in 2020 if the Tay goes 100% release. All of which, if widely known, might not not look good for the Tweed.
The answer is entirely in our own hands. There are those who, like me, would go 100% full catch and release all season long, until we can see that stocks are recovering. At the very least, short of full catch and release, Tweed rods need to exercise significantly more restraint in 2020 than they have in 2019, if we are to avoid some sort of pariah status amongst our peers.
So maybe in 2020 if you are lucky enough to catch one, and think of killing it, consider the transitory pleasure of eating it as compared to the long term, some would say existential, benefit of letting it go, so that it can spawn.
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Our “above ground” otter was here again this morning, emerging from a large rhododendron bush. I strongly suspect it has made its night time home there, snug as you could like, its previous holt, one assumes, a casualty of those mighty floods.
“Good morning Mr Otter” I saluted as it strolled towards the river, my dogs convulsed into paroxysms of barking rage.
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And finally, here are two more from Geoffrey Madan’s Commonplace Book.
“Never drink port in an east wind”
And, from a Notice Board near Bourne End Church, near Slough;
“NO ROAD BEYOND THE CEMETERY”
How true.
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