THE SNP DICTATES TO THE SALMON FISHERMEN OF SCOTLAND

Two weeks ago on the Ness I caught my first fish of the season, a beautiful ten pound salmon straight from the sea. I released it and happily watched it swim off, as most salmon fishermen have done with spring fish, and indeed with most of their fish throughout the season, for years now. But something rankled. In the past catch and release of most fish has been required or encouraged by nearly all owners and independent fishery boards and accepted by a large majority of fishermen. A legal ban on keeping scarce spring fish has also recently been widely accepted. But for all of this season, on 80% of Scottish rivers including the Ness, the Scottish government has decided it will be a criminal offence to kill and keep any salmon, despite the opposition of many owners, fishery boards and fishermen.

Apart from the fishism suggested by its leaders’ names, what induced the SNP government to impose such sanctions, when 90% of spring fish and 80% throughout the season were already being released? Unlike its members, the rod fishermen, owners and boards have for years been the most passionate advocates of salmon conservation, spending huge amounts of time and money on research, habitat improvements, pollution control, hatcheries, employing river watchers and ghillies, buying out net fisheries along the coast and supporting national and international agreements to limit large, unsustainable offshore catches and the damage done by fish farms. Keeping a few fish for the pot, many of us thought, paled to insignificance compared to all these threats and natural predation by birds, otters, mink, dolphins and seals as well.

The answer is probably that this was a first step towards state control, aimed eventually at realising many SNP members’ belief that salmon fishing in Scotland should be a public right, not the preserve of English toffs. While this may be partly true for a few fashionable rivers, or at least parts of them, it is an outmoded stereotype largely confined to the central belt. Many of the beats are owned by Scots with money, old or new, and a large proportion of the fishermen are Scots from all walks of life. My partner on the beat that day on the Ness was an artisan from the SNP bastion of Glasgow, who had like me and many others these days booked his fishing online after he saw there was a good run of fish and good conditions. He had got up at 3am to drive up, arriving at dawn, and happily released two fish before driving back.

The people I’ve met fishing in Scotland have included the local doctor, teacher, dentist, solicitor, accountant, estate agent, farmer, plumber, builder, painter, hydro worker, photographer, publican, tackle shop worker, policeman, scientist, fireman and ubiquitous businessman, working or retired, with English or indeed Scottish toffs a rarity. Though there are a fair number of ordinary English, they are usually outnumbered by locals. Scandinavians have become more common in recent years, as well as the odd American, German, Frenchman, Czech or Pole.

Oddly they nearly all share the view that increased government involvement in inland fishery management is unnecessary. They know running fisheries well requires the commitment of owners and is usually done for love, barely enabled by the money received in rents, and is just a part of the fabric of rural life that makes Scotland a good place to live in as well as visit. The visiting fisherman from countries with extensive public fisheries also know those are usually crowded and heavily overfished. That is often why they come here. And visiting fishermen are the lifeblood of many hotels and B&Bs.

Perhaps there would have been more support if the categorisation of rivers had not been done in a hurry, with a methodology that could hardly be called scientific. For each river system the ratio of returning salmon to the total area theoretically available on the river bed and loch margins for salmon to use for spawning and juvenile growth, is compared to that known to apply in a very few carefully studied rivers with healthy, sustainably exploitable populations. If it is within 80% of that it is category 1, and fishery management may decide what fish may be kept, if within 60% category 2, and fishery management may temporarily allow some fish to be kept but must take action to improve stocks, and if less than 60% category 3, in which case there is mandatory and total catch and release imposed by government and an improvement plan must again be put in place.

Very logical, you might say, but there are serious problems. Apart from the very few rivers with counters on weirs or dams with results acceptable to scientists, the estimation of the number of salmon returning is based purely on the previous 5 years reported rod catch. But this may vary greatly from actual stocks according to reporting accuracy, weather conditions and most importantly fishing effort and effectiveness. Many small spate rivers are only fishable for a few days each season after floods, and even big rivers may have low catches in drought years, when the bulk of the fish may run late or after the season ends, and those that are there are almost comatose and highly unlikely to take a fly or lure. The large areas of some river systems that are so inaccessible, deep or still that they are rarely if ever fished will also make their stocks look much poorer than they are.

Where there are counters it is hard to know how many fish breed below the dam and do not pass it. If those are estimated by rod catch, how do you avoid double counting the released ones that then do pass the dam? Reliable counters will obviously always record more fish than rod catches above them, and often more than rod catches below, since we don’t catch them all. There is often great difficulty in estimating the ratio of counted fish and caught fish to actual numbers returning for a whole system. This will vary from one to another according to how high up the counter is, how good the habitat and how amenable it is to fishing either side. The scientists seem reluctant to use the results from many counters because of these inconsistencies.

The entire geographical area available for salmon is in each system is assumed for the assessment to be usable when it obviously is not. Weed banks, river bed with solid rock, peat or mud bottoms, deep, slow or still water, especially if populated by predatory pike and trout, may all make a significant proportion unusable by adults or juveniles. If there are extensive areas like this in a system and only small areas of clean gravel for spawning and fry, a relatively small population may still be healthy, sustainable and exploitable.

In systems with several rivers or lochs, such as that around Loch Ness, it has been decided that the low numbers in one tributary mean the whole system must have the same low category and compulsory catch and release. But maybe this was always the case because of the geography. We also know that some strains of salmon, effectively different stocks, use different parts of a system and have different reproductive success. Springers, for example, may concentrate their spawning in one tributary.

Last year on the Ewe, the mile long river flowing out of Loch Maree to the sea, we equalled the record for the same party fishing for a week in early July, started by friends of my father over 35 years ago, of 24 salmon. Yet it is still category 3, probably because the fish are largely untouched once they reach the huge loch, having often shot straight through that short river without even seeing a fly, and are only subject to significant rod catches again when they get to Kinlochewe, at the mouth of a small spate river at the top of it. They mostly run that later in the season when there is rain. Most of the other streams entering the loch are not fished at all. This is probably one of many systems where the rod catch is a small proportion of the fish returning, resulting in the false assessment of an unhealthy population.

Clearly a lot more scientific research is needed, and many fishery managers, owners and fishermen think that the Scottish government should have waited for better evidence before regulating. It has certainly asked for an absurdly higher level of proof over damage done by sea lice from west coast fish farms to wild salmon and sea trout before regulating them further. The dramatic declines in catches on rivers close to farms has been obvious and accepted by most other north Atlantic countries’ governments for years. For it the fish farm industry is clearly more important than the sport fishing industry. It has consistently underestimated the importance  of west coast sport fisheries to employment and the economy. It apparently holds to some almost Calvinist idea that rod fisherman are the wrong sort of people having fun, while fish farming is an honest, hard working industry, despite the fact that it is fairly automated and probably employs fewer people than the hotels and fisheries used to.

The Scottish government emphasises that stocks will be reviewed for each river system annually, allowing rapid recategorisation, and that improvements will be made to the methods of assessment of stocks and usable areas. The best way to do this scientifically would be extensive electrofishing throughout the systems to see what adults and juveniles are actually there. If there were healthy numbers of juveniles wherever there was suitable habitat that alone should confirm the stock was exploitable. This would be very expensive but would allow several other important uncertainties to be resolved. It might prove for example that loch margins or long stretches of bare rock or mud in the river bed did not hold significant numbers of adult or juvenile salmon on any system, however prolific, allowing them to subtracted from the total areas used in the assessment. If combined with genetic analysis, it could also help tell us what different strains or stocks used different parts of a system, and which were healthy.

The Scottish government also asks the rod fishing community to accept that even if imperfect the current methods provide a useful indicator. Maybe for some rivers, probably not for others. But the fishing community is now looking for proof that it is committed to their improvement and will deliver. Otherwise more will conclude it is another area where it is interfering in something it does not need to and does not properly understand, and making laws that do not meet the basic test of acceptance by the people who will be subject to them. If some in the SNP do think salmon fishermen are beyond the pale, perhaps this should be expected, but this could be another real threat to its support in rural areas.

Of course on some rivers the owners and boards have been a little complacent, and the new incentives to be promoted and avoid relegation will be great for all of them. Some category 1 rivers are already advertising themselves as such, while those of us who know some 2s and 3s that are just as good are hoping for better prices and availability on them. There are only about 10% of fisheries in both category 1 and 2, and about 80% in category 3. For all of them we can expect both real and artificial improvements to become much more urgent.

The most obvious artificial one would be encouraging much greater fishing effort to make stocks appear bigger, though they would not actually have changed. The real ones like improving habitat and removing barriers in spawning burns and yes, a few years of total catch and release where stocks really are poor, may yet please us all. But that is only if they are associated with better management and regulation of fish farms and inshore and offshore netting. Otherwise all the efforts made on our rivers and lochs will be worthless.