Salmon porn - live action

When you're fishing don't you ever get the urge to get in among them? I've never been down in to a pool with a snorkel or diving gear but I'm told it can be fascinating. Perhaps the next best thing is watching a river through a camera, monitoring a pool constantly. You can do just that on this web site which has an above water angle that will show you if anyone turns up to fish here on the Suldaslaagen river in southern Norway.

Big salmon

Beware, you can end up spending a lot of time staring at these screens but you will see fish. The camera positioning is explained here. Do they catch big fish here? The answer can be found on this site, which not only has a picture of the pool, but also has a picture of a 28lb specimen caught here in 2008. I've never heard of salmon pornography, but if there was such a thing, this is the place to find it.

Give beavers a chance

A number of anglers have been getting in to a blather about the re-introduction of beavers in to Scotland. I have been surprised that so many so-called "celebrity anglers" who have lined-up in opposition to the move. Maybe they know things I don't.

I've come across European beavers in Norway. You don't see them during the day much but you certainly hear them at night. Fishing in the gloom, late at night, when your senses are becoming stretched, the sudden loud gunshot-like slap of a beaver tail on the surface of the water is enough to startle you out of your waders.

Those opposed to their reintroduction say that beaver dams will clog up good spawning streams. I doubt that. Beavers and salmon have been living side-by-side for thousands of years. One thing I do know about nature is that animals have ways of complementing their separate behaviours.

Lions stalk the plains of Africa, feeding off old and young herbivores. the Lions fulfill an important role in the ecosystem. It may be that beavers help the ecosystem in providing stretches of deeper water.

Reading through some comments from Anglers in North America, writing on the LinkedIn website, there seems to be some consensus that trout often sit close to Beaver dams.

"I fish around beavers all the time and if anything I think they do improve habitat to a point, especially habitat for juvenile trout, by flooding brushy areas of stream-side vegetation. Occasionally, if there are too many beaver dams on a stream they can cause excess siltation by slowing the flow too much and dams need to be removed. Salmon are creative and can get through or over most beaver dams," says Jake Ricks, a member of Fly Anglers in Business on LinkedIn.

Skip Zimmerman, another member, says: "I see beavers in almost every stream where I fish. Most have not created dams, just lodges. I've only seen dams in head water areas or in smaller spring creeks, so can't think of a reason why salmon spawning would be too affected."

Of nine replies on the site, all from people with experience of fishing among beavers, there is scarcely any negative comment. Here in the UK change of any kind leads to a kind of irrational alarmism. I simply don't understand it.

I never saw such vocal protests against sheep grazing to the edges of burns that really did damage spawning habitat. Conservation efforts, such as fencing off the grazing land (now widespread, but still quite rare when I mentioned it here in this piece), have done much to restore depth to burns. Maybe beavers could help in the same way. I think we should give them a chance.

What ever happened to the Vosso?

For some time now I have been curious to know what happened to the salmon runs on Norway's Vosso River that I read so much about in Arthur Oglesby's book, Salmon.

I started a discussion about it here in this fly fishing forums thread. After carrying out some recent work looking at the salmon farming industry I am now convinced that salmon farming was largely to blame.

There is an excellent feature about the river in the Winter 2007 journal of the Flyfishers' Club. The feature, written by Morten Harangen, mentions a recent fishing trip to the river when he failed to catch anything.

He says the record book for 2005 mentions "seven or eight" salmon caught on the river. But were these genetic Vosso salmon? Or were they escaped farm salmon? It does not say.

The catch is pitifully small, even if, as Harangen asserts, "there is no doubt there are still a few forty to fifty pounders out there."

I hope he is right. What will be difficult to discern is their genetic purity. On the other hand there is every reason to believe that something, if not entirely genetically pure, then very close to the original strain, could be restored even if it hails from a salmon farm cage. This is because a significant constituent of the Mowi strain, the first salmon farm fish to emerge in Norway, were salmon taken from a Vosso tributary, the Bolstad.

These large-growing fish are typically four or five sea-winter fish. The more winters that salmon spend at sea, the bigger they get, hence some excitement in the May Tay Salmon news bulletin from the Tay Salmon Fisheries Board, that a good proportion of the Tay's spring fish this year appear to have been bigger three-winter salmon.

All well and good - I'm as delighted as anyone to see evidence of big spring salmon back in the Tay - but the run is still relatively small compared with the 1970s. A few big salmon does not a spring run make.

As for the Vosso, it was closed in 1992 and re-opened in 1998 without any signs of improvement.

So why did the river collapse? Karl Magne Bolstad whose Berga farm overlooks the Bolstad pool, and which has some of the most famous beats on the river, has no doubt that many smolts were killed by sea lice that accumulate in large numbers around salmon farm cages. But there was also a lot of dumping in the river when a road was built. That killed a lot of fish, he says. Moreover a power plant constructed on the river led to significant changes in water temperature, another possible contributory factor.

It's astonishing how human activity in different areas has collectively destroyed one of the world's most precious wild salmon rivers with barely a whimper of protest. Today, hatchery-reared smolts are being transported past the salmon cages but will that work as a conservation effort?

Bolstad does not sound too optimistic of restoring the strain. A once mighty salmon river, its fish the stuff of legends, has been lost to angling and may never return. That's a crying shame.