The river, the bridge, the church, the town of Kelso and of course, Floors Castle, all looked exactly as I had remembered them to be. It was truly like stepping back into a frozen landscape.
So whilst the mighty Tweed might not have changed visibly, under the skin it has , dramatically. The run of salmon up this most iconic of rivers is a fraction of what it was when I was a young man. Though salmon there are not dead yet, the sands of time are running out fast. And my diary for that year tells me it was a poor week when I got there, 16 foot rod in hand. After many hours of fruitless toiling I told the ghillie I would try for the river’s celebrated roach. he was not best pleased but as I was paying the piper, my trotting rod was put up and the float began to weave its merry way.
My memory of a great session was
reinforced by the glowing diary entry. I had twenty or so fine silver sided roach by dusk, some kissing the 2 pound mark. They fought like tigers, they glowed with vitality, they would go on forever, I thought. Today, four decades on, the ghillies of 2019 told me no one has seen a Tweed roach for goodness knows how long. They have gone, those extraordinary fish, wiped from the great river.
No one could offer much of an explanation. There had been some attempts to net the river free of them but by and large, their vanishing had been unremarked and unrecorded. There will be no more great roach sport on the Tweed in my lifetime, probably ever. The suspicion of all the ghillies I spoke to is that the lordly salmon will not be far behind. Forty years from now, it could well be that the Tweed might not have much in it all.
WHY?? The one explanation that kept occurring was the explosion in numbers of cormorants and gooseanders this century. I heard tale after tale of a hundred birds or more on the pools, harvesting every salmon smolt, trout and grayling within it. When the hell are we going to do something about this? North, south, east or west, everywhere I go the story of mass destruction is the same one. We are in the grip of complete disaster for our wild fish and we seem to be frozen by inactivity.
Here at Piscario we are building reels and tackle for eternity. This is a magnificent aim but only if we get our immediate problem addressed and the era of the cormorant is firmly put into our past.