Under pressure river boards must reconsider hatcheries, says Dani Morey
THERE ARE TOPICS THAT ARE always going to rattle cages, not least the mention of hatcheries. As catches have dwindled, opinions have been changing and this year the majority of guests and gillies seem united in thinking they’re the best way forward.
There are loud whispers coming from many of our river boards about stocking programmes but will these come to fruition? Speak to almost anyone who’s fished or worked the rivers and they’ll tell you it’s high time they did. Anglers, gillies and owners are despondent, aware that, all too often, they’re casting a fly over empty water. When did you last walk into a black cloud of fry in the shallows of a pool that parted at your feet like Moses with the Red Sea? While our parents and grandparents caught 30-pounders without a thought, my generation caught 20-pounders and, naively, I assumed my children would grow up to experience the same. Without intervention of some kind it’s looking increasingly unlikely there’ll be anything left for them to catch at all. It’s clear we need a multi-faceted approach to save our salmon, and stocking is just one option, but it’s the one that instils the most hope in the most people. We need hatcheries run by the right people in the right way. Look what’s been achieved on the East Ranga in Iceland, Tovdalselva and other rivers in Norway, or closer to home on the Carron. Bob Kindness, a marine scientist and keen fisherman, has been successfully running a hatchery programme for 20 years on this west coast Scottish river. He’s achieved a hatching rate of 99.9%, proving that artificial spawning and rearing can be far more efficient than in the wild because conditions can be managed to best suit survival. There’s also no predation.
Excuses are often made that we don’t have the funding for hatcheries but historically many rivers had facilities, which have been mothballed for a few decades but could, perhaps, be brought back to life. Bob runs his facility with an occasional friend helping out, from collecting the broodstock and stripping the eggs, to monitoring the planted stock in the river. It’s simple, effective and cheap. He’s released and collated data at every possible stage in the freshwater cycle. Tagged smolts have returned as grilse and autumn fry, and spring smolts have returned as salmon and maturing hens fr
