Dr. Derek Mills, who now lives in Melrose, has reminded me of a paper he wrote for the River Tweed Commissioners Annual Report of 1977, called “Changes in the Weight Distribution of Autumn rod-caught Salmon on the Tweed. The opening paragraph of this says :

“During the Tweed autumn salmon rod fishing season of 1976 an unexpectedly large number of small fish in the range of 4 to 9lbs were being caught by anglers on some beats. This is a time of year when larger fish of 14 to 20lbs are the more usual size landed ………It was also observed that these small fish were mainly fresh from the sea, with many still carrying ‘sea-lice’ although caught on the middle beats of the river more than 40 miles upstream. However, these fish, as well as being small for the time of year were also very thin, some having a condition factor as low as 0.7 when 1.0 is the more usual value.”

Dr. Mills collected catch records from several beats for the seasons since 1960 and looked at the proportions of the catches generally made up by small grilse at this time of year and while finding that their proportion was indeed much greater than usual for middle river beats, it was not so for lower river beats.

His suggestion was the that small, thin, fish were typically small summer grilse that had been delayed from entering the river by the drought of 1976 and when they eventually did so on Autumn spates, they passed quickly through the lower river and were not caught there – hence their carrying sea-lice with them into the middle river. The larger, Autumn salmon proper, not having been delayed in this way, came up normally in the Autumn and not travelling at the speeds of the delayed earlier fish were more available to the lower river beats.

Certainly, this year, fish with sea-lice, are being caught far up river and there have been fish with tide-lice almost reaching the upper river. It was, certainly, also a very dry Summer here, with very low water levels and no fishing and little inducement for the fish to enter the river.

Dr. Mills suggested the earlier, smaller, summer fish lost condition while waiting off the coast in summer 1976 and hence appeared in the state they did in the autumn. However, one piece of information that I have that he did not have then is that 1976 was an exceptionally poor year for the Northumberland drift nets. The 1970’s were their heyday, and catches in both 1975 and 1977 were heavy, but in 1976 were almost trivial.  It was in 1976 in fact, that the then MAFF planned to tag fish in the drift nets, but so few were caught that the project had to be postponed to 1977. If the earlier, smaller, summer, grilse were indeed waiting off the coast to make an appearance in the rod catches much later than usual, then it could not have been in the Northumberland area.