news/editorial

24 November 2019 News/Editorial

With the score just a little over 10 salmon for last week’s fishing, nothing more need be said. The final 2019 totals look like being within a gnat’s crochet of 6,000 salmon and around 2,100 sea trout, both to be adjusted to the correct figures when the RTC has had a chance to add up all the 2019 beat annual catch return forms, which must be submitted to them before Christmas. The final figures will be published as normal before the March 2020 RTC quarterly meeting.

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Anyone still reading these pages must be doing so out of habit, not because there is any good fishing news. Perhaps we all need to escape from the pervading late November meteorological and political gloom, even if only for a few minutes. Whatever the reason, thank you.

There are no fish and consequently almost no reports of fish caught. Those who do not live here might imagine red and black old fish leaping around all over the place, but impossible to catch. Indeed, many have written complaining that we should not be fishing because of the harm we could be doing.

Let me repeat. There are no fish, none at all. As such, what harm anyone can possibly do by fishing for “them” is anyone’s guess. For those of us who can well recall Novembers past, only six years ago, it is an extraordinary sight. An empty river.

The mystery remains. Whereas both spring and summer catches are similar in numbers to those pre 2014, if very slightly lower, the mid to late autumn run has all but gone completely. And those who blame the RTC, the birds, the seals, or whoever else, for this have one killer question they cannot answer.

Do the birds and the seals kill all those smolts which would come back in the autumn (birds),or salmon that have come back in the autumn (seals), whilst doing no more obvious damage than the pre 2014 norm to spring and summer smolts and salmon?

Clearly that is completely absurd.

Whatever has happened may just be cyclical (we hope) or it may be more serious than that (unprecedented global warming), but it is certainly not a product of what is happening within the river.

The “cyclical” believers think it will all come good in time. Those who think it may be more serious than that point to the fact that there may well never have been fewer fish coming into the Tweed than there are now. Low rod catches of yore were always linked to factors such as UDN and massive netting catches, both in the river and at sea, so the causes were easily identifiable.

In the past, the rods were last in line for their “go” at the migrating fish. Now we are first, there is no UDN, there are almost no nets, and yet numbers could well be at an all time low for the rods to catch. Of course, the causes lie in the sea, and equally, of course, even when and if we find out what they are, there may be nothing we can do to correct them, in the huge expanse that is the North Atlantic.

But do you put all your money on red, on the “cyclical” argument, and sit back and hope it will come good (which it well might), or do you hedge your bets, between red and black, and try to find out why between 96 and 99 out of every 100 of our smolts die in the sea?

That is the nub of the present debate.

Or at least it should be.