news/editorial

8 October 2017 News/Editorial

The total Tweed catch last week was 296 salmon and 19 sea trout, making the cumulative totals for the season to 7th October 2017 4,945 salmon and 1,566 sea trout.

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The puzzled tenants, Friday before last, could not understand why they had caught nothing.

They were good fishermen. The fish were mainly old, river fish, but even so why would nothing pull?

It was a beautiful sunny autumn day, with a soft, slightly humid gentle south west breeze, air temperature mid-afternoon 21C (70f) and water temperature 13C (55f).

Before I could stop myself I said “They will take next week, because it is going to get colder”.

It was a terrible thing to say, instantly regretted…... but too late.

At a stroke I had dashed their chances of catching much then, in favour of the (to them) unknown fishers the following week.

Not only that, but I am sure they thought it was just one of those things people say, an excuse for when things go wrong, allied to an old wives tale about water and air temperature and why salmon take a fly.

But of course, what I said would happen is exactly what did happen, for I had seen the forecast.

Last week the water temperature dropped from 13C (55f) on Sunday to 8C (47f) on Wednesday, almost the exact inverse of what happened the week before; the river catch (despite 2 days pretty much lost to floods) was 296 salmon; the week before, when the weather and water got so hot, the catch was 127 salmon.

There is some logic to it in that the salmon seem to become more aggressive at this time of year when it gets colder, best of all after a frost; who knows, but maybe it is something to do with lower water temperatures triggering their spawning mechanisms.

More generally than that, we also know that salmon do not like heat, which is why the sensible summer fisher will eschew the afternoon’s sport (or lack of it) in favour of the sunless cool of the evening.

There is no holy grail anywhere inscribed “how to catch salmon”, but you will find me in more confident mood with a cool north or north westerly, preferably with cloud cover, than when we get those (few) balmy, humid days of gentle, muggy south/southwesterlies.

As for the coming week, the one thing, it seems, that will be absent is frost, with increasingly strong and mild westerlies blowing in from the mid Atlantic, with rain possible on Wednesday and Friday. Even night-time temperatures will, in the main, be in double figures.

Which could mean that catching any of those older river fish will be hard work, with consequent reductions in catches, unless some more fresh ones appear from the sea.

But then you never know….the forecasts can be wrong, and/or the fish might decide that everything written above about colder water…….

….. is rubbish.