Late season fishing

Before I begin, these are all my own personal thoughts and feelings.  I am not demanding that everyone should stop fishing in September or anything like that.  I am just putting my thoughts out there for whoever wants to read them.  I already know I'm a weird, strange character and I find it difficult to explain things verbally, so I write them down.

There are just 7 days left in the 2018 fishing season on the Faughan. We've had quite a dry spell recently again with the river being quite low.  This weekend though has seen Storm Calum and another front bringing heavy rain and the river is quite big but still carrying some colour as I type this. I have already stopped fishing for the season so it won't have any effect on me.

I have to say that I'm not very comfortable with fishing at this time of the year.  I just don't see any need for me to do it. Whether it's one of the traits of my introvert personality but I almost feel sorry for the salmon at this time of the year. Having been spawned in the river two or three years ago, to survive predation, pollution and all the other raft of in river problems.  Having swam thousands of miles with all the problems that they encounter on the high seas, to make it back to river again after all the trials and tribulations that will have seen millions of salmon not make it back, through everything that man and nature can throw at them, to get caught by an angler this late in the season and perhaps not get the chance to spawn.  That is just so very sad in my book.

I almost liken it the story of George Edwin Ellison. George was career soldier in the British Army.  He had joined the army many years before the First World War broke out.  George was with the first waves of troops to enter France and Belgium in 1914.  He fought in many of the key battles of WW1 including Mons, Ypres, Loos and Cambrai to name but a few.  He had survived for the entirety of WW1 only to be shot and killed by a sniper at 9:30am on 11th November 1918.  4 hours after the Armistice had been signed and just 90 minutes before the ceasefire was to take effect at 11am.  

This isn't just a recent notion in my head.  I have thought this way for many years. Years before the internet or facebook or online forums and any of the zealousy on any side of the Catch and Release debate.

The 'Harvest Run' was always the time I looked forward to most on the Faughan. Without doubt, the grilse runs were fantastic and you usually caught more fish but the Harvest Run was my favourite run of the year.

The Faughan grilse had got quite small, 5lb was a big grilse with the size usually between 2 and 4lb.  The Harvest Run though in the middle weeks of September, beautifully shaped fish, shining silver with sea lice usually still attached in a size of 8lb and over.  That was fishing.  That was the Faughan at it's best.  There would still be fresh fish arriving until the season ended on October 20th.

Sadly, things have now changed.  That Harvest Run has disappeared along with the biggest part of the grilse run.  For whatever reason, our rivers now are not getting the runs they did in the past.  I have read about problems in the rivers, problems at sea, problems with fish eating birds, seals, dolphins, anglers... the list could go on and on.  I really don't know why the runs are not what they were nor do I want to speculate here.  This is not what this post is about.

Even in the days when catching silver fish late in the season was more than likely, you did catch coloured fish too.  For some reason, I just didn't get the same buzz from catching the coloured ones as I did when I caught a beautiful silver one.  I really don't know why that was.  They were all salmon so catching a salmon should have the same excitement or sense of achievement attached to it regardless of colour.  It just didn't feel that way to me.  It was like catching a sea trout for me.  If you've read my blog post entitled "Auld Trout" you will know that I didn't see catching sea trout as particularly interesting and almost as by-catch.  That was what hooking and landing coloured salmon felt like too.  I would be fishing, feel the line tightening, "Yess", get it in close enough to get a look at it, "Ahh S**te it's coloured".  Just like sea trout, I didn't treat them any differently to a clean salmon and played them hard and got them off the hook and released as soon as possible.  I just didn't have that big silly grin on my face or the buzzing feeling I had when I'd hooked and landed a nice silver fish.

As the fresh runs of fish got smaller and smaller on the Faughan late in the season, so did my interest in fishing.

Since 2010, I have fished a handful of days in the month of September when I got the water in the river that I liked and I haven't wet a line in October since 2009.

It was 2004 though when I really started to question if I 'needed' to be fishing in October at all.  It was the last day of the season and as usual I had the day booked off work to fish the last day.  I remember it so well, walking up the fields to a pool above me here with the grass crunching under my feet with the frost.  I can still picture the fields all white with frost and the leaves nipping off the trees under their own weight as there wasn't a breath of wind.

The first pool I fished I hooked a fish after only a few casts.  A heavily coloured fish around the 6lb mark which was played hard and released very quickly.  In the next pool down, I had fished through the neck of the pool and was making my way into the pool itself when the line tightened again and I had another fish on.  It was a strange take.  Then this dull, drawn out fight started.  It took me much longer than I wanted to get the fish in and get the hook out of it.  It was a heavily coloured hen fish not far off double figures. I then held it in the water to recover.  The water was so cold that I had pains in my hands holding this large hen fish, hoping it would recover.  After what seemed like an absolute age, I would say around 20-25 minutes, it eventually showed some signs of life and swam off very slowly.  I often think about that fish when I think about fishing at this time of the year.  I seriously doubt that the fish survived to spawn. I should really have knocked it on the head after the first 5 minutes. Had I not bothered fishing that day, there's every chance that that hen fish could have made it to the spawning beds unhindered and produced another 8 or 9000 eggs for the river.  If me not fishing now results in even one single fish making it to the spawning grounds unhindered, I am more than happy to stop fishing sooner in the season.

People say to me that the same things could happen in July that could happen in October.  That is very true but the fish I hook and land in July are a lot cleaner than the fish in October.  If one does become deep hooked or doesn't recover, I will knock it on the head and give to someone to eat.  It is much harder to give away a salmon in October that is very coloured.

A lot of people say too that there are silver fish in the river so it should be OK to be able to fish for them.  My answer to that is that there are fresh fish entering the river in every month of the year.  Some months have more than others obviously, but the counter on the Faughan showed more fish entering the river in April and May, when the river is closed, than entered the river in September and October in recent years.  Should the river be opened all year round?  I would hope not.


Again, I know overthinking is a trait of an Introvert personality but I have always questioned why people feel the need to stick to 'rules' in deciding what is right and what is wrong in their own minds.  Just because someone decided there would be a date when fishing should stop every year, does that really make catching a coloured salmon on the 21st of October any more of an issue than catching one on the 19th?

I am really not trying to offend anyone reading this or trying to start a campaign to have rivers closed early or anything like that.  I wish everyone a safe and enjoyable end to the fishing season.  I'll look forward to this day week when the season will be already ended and I can start to walk the river again without annoying anyone.  It won't be long until I'll be looking for Redds and signs of spawning activity again which I enjoy as much as the fishing.