I have five years’ experience fishing for Atlantic salmon. Back in 2018, I admit, I ate farmed salmon and had to be educated and persuaded as to why I should stop. I have been very lucky; I have picked up the odd bit of fishing here and there while looking after clients in Iceland for the most part. I caught my first salmon in 2019. So, if you like, I am new to the world of salmon fishing and therefore hungry to learn all information about them, their well-being, their survival etc. I make this point because it should be kept in mind throughout this piece. Basically, I am a newbie to Atlantic salmon and salmon fishing.
I have to admit, from the 20,000 foot view, it is confusing and the best example I can give you is I am wondering why Sir David Attenborough, the God of wildlife in my view, and his team of researchers, who must be amongst the best connected people in their field, do not know that salmon farms have done, and continue to do, an extraordinary amount of damage to the stocks of wild Atlantic salmon in Scotland and indeed elsewhere in the world with Norway being a leading example. Or do they know but for some reason chose to ignore it in their Wild Isles episode? Have a look for yourself Episode 4 Freshwater.
This past 18 months has been an interesting but concerning time for the Atlantic salmon. In some ways the Attenborough Wild Isles series sums up the problems we face or perhaps I should say, do not face. Episode 4 came out on 23rd March 2023. Through 2023 I learned a great deal about the UK efforts to save the salmon. The Missing Salmon Alliance, the ‘likely suspects’, the Laxford project, the West coast tracking, the Moray tracking, the list goes on but look on the Missing Salmon Alliance website and the AST website and there is NOTHING about salmon farms? I know I am new to salmon conservation, but it blows my mind that salmon farms are not even mentioned as a factor for our salmon declining. Is it on purpose that only one of our fish conservation organisations is fighting fish farming as one of the biggest threats? Are our charities trying to play good cop, bad cop? If they are, why do we have six good cops and one bad? Let’s take the AST’s post of 10th July about smolts as an example. No mention of salmon farms and sea-lice being a major threat to smolts. No mention that one of the reasons our smolts may be weak in rivers is because our wild fish may have been infiltrated with the weaker farmed salmon gene pool.
“Salmon are now a red listed species in Norway and have suffered a 50% decline in 40 years”.
Then one realises that the charity Wild Fish are missing from the alliance and looking at their website you start to get into the issues that the broader population understand or should understand – water quality and salmon farming. But why are Wild Fish missing from the Missing Salmon Alliance? Why do Atlantic Salmon Trust, GWCT, Angling Trust, Fisheries Management Scotland, The Rivers Trust and Fish Legal leave Wild Fish out in the cold? The clue seems to be in the fact that Wild Fish publicly stand against salmon farms, the rest do not seem to. A link with Attenborough? A proper journalist needs to have a dig into these issues.
In my eyes WildFish are doing a fantastic job of educating and pushing the truth behind these abysmal farms. If it were sheep, cows or pigs with their legs hanging off or their heads half eaten by lice it would be shut down immediately but for salmon it seems acceptable? This all leaves a newbie like me confused. Is social media wrong? A natural progression to all the anti-chat about salmon farming on social media is to reach out to the authorities. One would be forgiven for thinking the members of the Missing Salmon Alliance would be a good place to start but almost nothing on the MSA site or its members sites or on their social media about farming? What if I had not stumbled on Wildfish? Or are Wildfish wrong hence why they appear to be the outcasts? Attenborough’s Wild Isles say nothing, MSA says nothing, what to conclude? How does the public conclude that salmon farms are bad?
On 20th August 2023, what everyone in Iceland dreaded happened. One of the salmon farms, Arctic Fish, announced the news that there had been a large escape of salmon and soon we watched on as social media showed the young fly fishers of Iceland set to work in the rivers trying to hook, net, spear or by any means catch the farmed fish before they bred with the wild fish. The fish they caught ended up in bags in front of the Reykjavik Parliament on 7th October.
On 11th December 2023 during COP28, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species revealed Atlantic salmon have been reclassified from ‘Least Concern’ to ‘Endangered’ in Great Britain (as a result of a 30-50% decline in British populations since 2006 and 50-80% projected between 2010-2025). This was alarming news staring us in the face despite the fact we probably knew. During 2023, Silverscale, the only company in the UK dedicated in the promotion, marketing and sale of fish from a land-based farming operation in Iceland was launched in the UK. It brought land-based farmed salmon to the UK which we could eat without feeling bad. No antibiotics, pesticides, hormones, foreign chemicals or sea-lice so the website says.
Soon the Scottish salmon season began with mixed results almost in line with IUCN predictions. Then the Norwegian season began with the wonderful traditional pre-season dinners on the evening of 31st May until the anglers can head out fishing at midnight. It was clear that something was wrong, the next few days were almost devoid of the usual excitement on social media about the lucky few to bump into a huge fish on the Gaula, Orkla or the famous Aröy as examples.
Just 20 days later, on 20th June 2024, the Norwegian Environment Agency announced the closure of all salmon fishing on 33 of the country’s more southern rivers, as a response to low salmon numbers due to man-made impacts including climate change and salmon farming. There was also talk of it being a reaction to fishing regulations on rivers like the Gaula and the killing of big fish and that there were not enough multi-sea-winter fish in these rivers. Further gossip conjected that this was a move by the Environment Agency to shake things up politically because the fisheries ministry is being so lax in controlling the salmon farming industry. This shocked many but should it really have been a shock? We know the damage the salmon farms are doing; we know that the majority of rivers in Norway have an appalling record of catch and release. Salmon are now a red listed species in Norway and have suffered a 50% decline in 40 years. The trend is still downward, and Norway is home to 20% of the world population of salmon.
The “in-river” catch was 130,000 salmon in 2010 which is now down to 70,000 in 2023 of which only 19,000 were released, that is 27%. Even the greatest river of them all, the Alta can only claim a release rate of 35%. On 9th July, the long-awaited review took place, and 17 rivers remained closed including the famous Gaula and Orkla rivers. Many of the others were allowed to re-open but only under certain conditions. There are rivers which were not closed, mostly because they are private, having disastrous seasons with as low as 12% of their normal catch or less.
The UK catch and release story can be traced back to March 1998 when the Field Magazine published a piece by Charles Teace (an anagram of catch and release) asking the question whether our salmon were worth more dead or alive and suggesting that catch and release was/is part of the solution. The ghost writer asked for public support to the message and received it in numbers. In fact, three pages of organisations supporting the movement were published by the Field who should be congratulated. The author went on to try and spread the word further and asked Trout and Salmon to publish the piece as well. However, the two most vocal voices against catch and release at that time were Jamie Illingworth, the Head of Strutt and Parker Sporting Department and Sandy Leventon, the then editor of Trout and Salmon. Undeterred, the author raised over £10,000 to run the piece as an advertisement in Trout and Salmon. Shame on you Trout and Salmon!
The UK should be congratulated for its willingness to adapt. In 2023 22,477 salmon were landed and 97% were returned. The rod-effort to catch those fish would make ugly reading at perhaps over 30 days of rod-effort per fish. I think the UK’s embracing of catch and release was perhaps in part due to the efforts of Mr Teace but it was at a time when Russia was exploding on the scene as was Tierra del Fuego and many international destinations which were all catch and release and this really aided an easy transition. As the 2024 season progressed, there has been some real glimpses of good news for Scottish rivers with rivers in the north doing well with good water conditions and some good catches on the Spey and the Dee.
As July commences eyes turn to Iceland which had been poor in recent years and was facing its own set of challenges. The linking of salmon fishing leases to inflation with no allowance for how the fishing was actually performing has and remains a real problem. It means that regardless of the fishing, prices go up and fishing has been poor in recent years and the international market is beginning to lose its patience.
Rivers like the Nordura and Thvera/Kjarra started well and the general results as I write this have been good. There is no doubt that plenty of water throughout the season has helped but there is also no doubt that the numbers of fish are much improved too. There is real contrast to management style in terms of conservation. Some rivers still allow guests to kill 2 grilse under 69 cms per day. That does not mean the guests do, in fact one river that has such a rule says its release rate is 92%. However, 2 grilse per day x 10 rods x 90-day season is 1800 fish. That is likely more grilse than there are in the river. It seems to me that a hard and fast kill policy might be fine on the good years but a potential disaster on the poorer years.
If rods are still taking their ‘kill allowance’ from the very few fish they are catching in a bad year, this must be taking a big toll, and bigger percentage, of the run. Keep in mind that on some rivers a very high proportion of the run is caught. Surely, the ‘kill policy’ if allowed at all, should be adjusted by management real time depending on the season? Another river with the same rule claims it has to allow some killing ‘because of the corporate groups’. Let’s just think about that for a second – let’s watch the Patagonia film and then reflect on the fact that ‘corporate groups’ which one could be forgiven for thinking might be occasional or less serious anglers, have the financial power to persuade rivers to allow them to kill salmon. Really?
Here is the contrast, The Six Rivers Foundation in the north-east of Iceland says it ‘seeks to reverse the decline of Atlantic salmon’ and theirrivers benefit from the most forward-thinking Atlantic salmon conservation effort in Iceland/the entire Atlantic which includes tagging on all rivers, radio tagging and tracking on some of them, relocation of fish in the autumn to spawn in tributaries to open up the expanse of water available to the salmon, a massive tree-planting project (1 million + trees) to enhance bio-matter in the rivers to, in turn enhance food in the river, predator control with the focus on the non-indigenous mink, and perhaps the most enlightened rules adopted on any salmon river which are as follows:
- No weighted flies
- No sink or sink-tip lines
- No hooks bigger than size 12
- Two fishing sessions per day of no longer than 4 hours per session
- No more than 2 fish from any pool in one session
- Not more than four fish per rod per session
- Full catch and release Any dead/bleeding fish should be returned to the lodge’s kitchen
These rules hope to achieve:
- Less fishing pressure but great fishing for everyone
- Less impact on the fish
- Better fishing for everyone throughout the season due to less pressure of weighed or bigger flies and less intense fishing pressure
- Avoids excess when the opportunity to catch big numbers of fish arises
- A more balanced season for all
- No ‘damage’ to pools for the next guest who may fish it due to too many fish being caught or the way in which the fish were fished for
- No incentive to kill fish in the hope of taking it home by calling it ‘a bleeder’
The most significant point that they made to me which I will think about for a long time is the fact that you do not know which fish you may be killing. In their radio tagging they had one cock fish head into their newly opened section of river (thanks to a salmon ladder) that one cock fish made the difference to hens laying in that new section of river. The point being that you may just be killing the one cock fish which goes up a small tributary and would grow or begin a new generation of salmon from that place. So, every time you think about killing a fish, think about how important that one fish may be. Back to these rules briefly, they are working because they now have the statistics to demonstrate it.
On the other side of the Atlantic in Canada their rules are pretty tight. They vary from region to region but they even issue licence holders with tags and if you are caught with an untagged dead salmon, you will find yourself in real trouble. There are allowances for killing of some fish but equally, the killing or releasing of a certain number of fish generally means you have to stop fishing. Although Russia is no longer an option they also have good catch and release records and standards with rivers also carrying out tagging projects to keep track of their salmon runs.
Back to social media in 2024. The famous Icelandic angler Arni Baldursson, who many blame for overfishing and mismanaging the rivers he used to lease, seems to have had an epiphany during his major tour of Norway and is now preaching to his flock that we need to catch and release and treat our rivers with much greater respect. The actor and director James Murray has become a great campaigner about salmon and salmon farms and has taken it upon himself to point out when he feels fish are not being handled correctly. These are steps in the right direction in my view and they demonstrate a sea-change in the mood. I noted that Spey Casting World Champion Scott Mackenzie caught 9 salmon one day on the Dee which is fantastic, and I will come back to that. I even found a comment directed at the Six Rivers Foundation; it reads ‘be extremely careful of the new wave in Iceland offering luxury lodges with the most ridiculous fishing rules all in the name of so-called salmon preservation. Watch your wallet!’ so it says.
Amongst all this, there have been two stand-out moments for me which, along with the confusion of contrasting policies and actions, have led me to write this piece. Last season, a guest in Iceland caught two 14lbs salmon and one 16 lbs salmon in about 5 casts and had massive battles with all of them chasing them down the river. It was clear that there were more fish to be caught but after the third fish, he stopped and commented that he did not feel going back in to catch another felt right. His reason was not age or fitness or stamina, simply he did not feel right going in to catch yet more; basically, restraint was his reason.
Another guest this year also caught my attention. He caught a fine fresh 12 lbs fish which cartwheeled its way down the length of the pool and was finally landed at the tail of the pool. Again, that was enough for him. No other reason than he felt he had had a wonderful experience and there was no need to press for more. That leads me to wonder if more of us should not begin to think this way. I know we have embraced catch and release and I know we endure hours, days, weeks, months and even years of nothing but when our time of plenty finally comes, like Scott McKenzie for example (no criticism of him at all) nowadays, with salmon in the state they are, should we be more restrained, should we think before we take full advantage of that moment of plenty? Like the Six Rivers Foundation, is two from one pool enough, is four in a session or a day enough? Equally, are we fishing too late in the season? Should we be catching gravid hens and badgering aggressive cock fish which are ready to spawn? I know this has financial impacts but tell me what you think.
In my personal life my friends and family tend to roll their eyes at me when I start my salmon rant if anyone even thinks of ordering or buying salmon. I think people forget that these incredible wild fish are also part of the food chain in the ocean, and a BIG part of it at that, they are the food source for all your cute and cuddly seals, orca, dolphin, Atlantic halibut, Atlantic bluefin tuna, swordfish, and striped bass. Even Greenland shark, mako sharks, porbeagle sharks, and other sharks. Seabirds such as the Northern gannet… the list really does go on, if salmon disappear a lot of wildlife will suffer, hence my surprise in Wild Isles avoiding these important subjects.
My biggest question however, or perhaps request, and remember I am new to this salmon fishing drug, is how should I navigate all the contrasts I have demonstrated in this piece. What should I think and believe, who is right and who is wrong and why, yet again, similar to the world of shooting, can we not all agree and pull in the same direction for that common goal, the survival the Atlantic salmon. For me, the Six Rivers Foundation rules are a massive step in the right direction, if restraint means a steadier season in which everyone can enjoy their days and have good fishing, it is a huge win and, of course, the salmon benefit too.
