The stocks of wild Atlantic salmon, a fish abundant within British rivers a generation ago, are in a state of collapse.
In 2018, the last year for which records are available, 37,196 salmon were caught by Scotland’s anglers. That has fallen from over 100,000 a decade ago and is the lowest number since records began in the 1950s.
Just 4,000 of those were taken on the Tay, a river that in the 1980s was producing more than 12,000 each season.
LINK (via: The Daily Mail)
Look not to local overnight sensations and slimey scapegoats, but to the wider international environmental situation, fellas – to the mass mortality of Far North-bound migrating smolts caused by the catastrophic, now totally out of control warming of the sub-Arctic Atlantic of the past decade or two. Some years, say one in three or four and rising, until a few seasons back, the smolts would miraculously “get through” to the northern feeding grounds, just as they always and pretty dependably did, then return en adult masse to offer us sports a bonanza; NOW they don’t.
And it ain’t because of some local slime or some here today – gone tomorrow, quick ‘n’ easy target for a newspaper politicians, but the whole damned lot of us.
Oh … oh … oh my God … I feel a bit of Zappa coming on….
https://youtu.be/w-sREpqDiUo
And then there is Tradition fighting its corner, in the Solway as featured below and in Wales where men have fished salmon and sea-trout with nets drifted from a pair of basket-boat coracles and estuary tidewaters Seine Net since probably well before the arrival of the Romans in Britain a couple of millennia back.
Then there were the Irish coastal netting stations – search for ‘Carrick-a-Rede’ on Google for an example, and see what a great industry it once was.
Back to the Solway, the former home of great salmon commercial salmon-fisher, gaff-net-‘n’snare poacher and rod-and-line man, who moved to West Wales many decades ago (where I met him in my teens) because there a) more salmon, and b) “The bailifffs of several rivers were after me….”.
From BBC News, Jan 21st –
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-51124288
Everything coming to something of head for both men and British Atlantic salmon, now. And gone so fast.