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.
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.
Labels: Arthur Oglesby, Berga farmhouse, Bolstad, Flyfishers' Club, Karl Magne Bolstad, Morten Harangen, Mowi strain, Norway, River Tay, smolts, Vosso
posted by Richard Donkin at
2:32 PM
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