JANUARY, and an end to the hollow-black void of horror recognised in much of Western society as the festive season, but to the Scottish salmon angler only as the one in which he or she cannot fish. Tomorrow, the River Tay, serene and clear and largely indifferent to her votaries’ emotion, opens, and for half a day at least gives hope anew to anglers before the inevitable return of the realisation that pursuit of a fish which does not feed in fresh water, and in the middle of winter at that, is a mixture of blind faith and self-torture of such lucid cunning that it must qualify as a form of religion.

And indeed, not being immune to sporting cliches, many participants see it as such. Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It wrote: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing … We were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen.”

Here in Scotland, it has been a sport untouched for the century and a half since Maclean’s family was shunted from the Highlands, the estates great and small left alone to shepherd the salmon, and at times the gargantuan profits, via the ever-watchful eye of the resident ghillie. But behold, change is afoot, and for almost two years a great iconoclast, the Wild Fisheries Review, has been rewriting the book.

The Government must be commended for its endeavour; provoking change in the country’s most intransigent, and often its most belligerent, subculture was never going to be easy. While apocryphal riparian tales may cause blood feud between rival anglers, the riverbank is also an unlikely setting for a disparate alliance of patrician and proletariat, uniting forces to rail against, well, almost everything – but of late mainly what is seen as the Government’s meddling.

It is perhaps testament to angling’s privileged and forgotten seclusion that stakeholders believed the Wild Fisheries Review was about the sport, rather than the future of fish, and in particular one fish, the Atlantic salmon, which is part of the nation’s natural and cultural heritage. Conservation measures have come, in the main, in the form of categorising rivers according to the health of their salmon runs, ranging from three (the least healthy and on which no salmon can be killed) to one (the most healthy where estates and associations can continue with their existing fishery management policy, should it exist). Simple enough then, one would expect, to impose restrictions on killing fish on rivers where salmon – or any other fish – are under threat.

When it was first enforced in 2016, the majority of rivers on the west coast were classified as category three, which took a huge step towards curtailing the profligacy of fishing clubs which imposed no catch limit of their own.

Perhaps more ominously for the Government, however, it was a spectacular admission of the unmitigated ecological disaster pouring from the cages of marine aquaculture in the West Highlands: where there were salmon farms, there were category three rivers.

The low numbers of salmon were probably not, then, due to angling pressures alone, and fishermen’s grievances of victimisation are certainly not without warrant. In 2017, the situation has suddenly changed, with Government calculations moving many systems, mainly on the west coast, up a grade – 47 now have category one status in comparison to 20twenty in 2016.

It is in the calculations that the problems lie. As perfect and beautiful as a formula may be, it can respond only to the information with which it is fed. Should this be inaccurate or incomplete, then one must expect results which at best only loosely depict the reality of a given situation.

The Government and Marine Scotland must surely be aware of the discrepancies in its system, which relies not merely on information from the river being categorised, but to a worrying degree on that provided by another chosen river – not always in the vicinity – which has a suitable fish counter, of which there exist, apparently, only five nationwide.

Thus, much of the information used to ascertain the health of Ayrshire salmon runs comes from the Galloway Dee. Taking little or no account of the topographical, climatic, and environmental vagaries between systems can, needless to say, lead to wild inaccuracies, and the Government’s method, when compared to rivers on which rigid scientific analysis has been carried out by rivers trusts, seems to give an inflated estimate of salmon numbers.

The one central plank of the calculations coming specifically from each river, the figures provided by catch returns – a statutory obligation required of all anglers, associations, and estates indicating how many fish, and what species, are caught over a season – is therefore paramount. But this in itself has flaws.

While reporting high catches is a boon to private estates keen to up their prices, if an association does likewise, the river instantly becomes of greater value commercially to its owners. Tenants therefore risk an increase in rent, or eviction, should they come clean on the Leviathans ritually harassed from the perfect clear waters they fish.

The Crown Estate, not an institution one generally associates with privation, even sees fit to charge tenant associations up to £50 per extra salmon caught on top of the annual rent.

THE case of the River Garnock in Ayrshire is most stark. Despite catch returns having been submitted by only one of the three tenant angling associations – Kilwinning Eglinton – on the system for decades, it moved from a category three to a category one over the close season. Astonishingly, it appears Marine Scotland was unaware of the two other tenant associations on the system, basing categorisation only on the data provided by Kilwinning, an association which has followed not only the law by reporting catches, but has implemented its own ecologically responsible catch limit on anglers.

The Wild Fisheries Review team, and Secretary for the Environment Roseanna Cunningham, made aware of the situation by anglers concerned that clubs on the system with no conservation measures in place were being rewarded for Kilwinning’s efforts, paid no heed, and instead bullishly enforced their methodology on the Garnock using the limited and skewed evidence available.

Whether this is an abuse of logic or conservation, if nothing else it gives licence to stakeholders and anglers who doubt the Government’s ability to overhaul and manage fisheries.

From auspicious beginnings, at least to a mind not ritually sneering at change through the narrow eye of the sceptic, elements of the Wild Fisheries Review have descended into poorly researched, stumbling farce, the precision of science usurped by the very conjecture and myth from which the sport was supposed to be extricated.

If this is the field in which we now play, one may suggest, without reproach, that the Government is keen to use a system which doesn’t provide quite such a damning indictment on salmon farms and that, under pressure to conform to EU directives to protect Atlantic salmon stocks, it has grasped at the nearest answer available instead of dealing with the most difficult one. All, however, is not lost, and the Wild Fisheries Review can still become the foundation on which our freshwater fish are not only better protected, but better understood, in the years ahead.

While not perfect, a strict implementation of the catch return data must be used in future. Where there is doubt as to its legitimacy, anglers should not, to term it euphemistically, be harvesting Atlantic salmon.

The eventual aim, however, must be that each river is surveyed by scientifically qualified personnel in order we know, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, how many smolts leave a system, how many return as adults, why they return, when they do so and to where, how they live, how they die. Perhaps too much understanding of the world removes the romance of enigma.

Yet while there’s a charm to mystery, humanity’s erosion of the world’s ecosystems means we can no longer afford the luxury of the fable and the misunderstood. It is time for the Government to improve this worthwhile process and enlighten the cynical and inquisitive mind alike.