Tay kelt

Yes, that's all I had to show for six days on the Tay with just two spring salmon among six rods. It was disheartening to see just the odd fish running in such great spring conditions with a falling river and settled conditions.

The six days of casting practice, I suppose, will come in handy for the Dee in a week's time. The Dee figures seem to have picked up a little last week while the Tweed's again were poor.

The opposite banks are fished separately on the Dee so I was surprised to see that the left bank Kincardine beat had 10 fish while the right bank Carlogie beat had nothing. It's the same stretch of water, after all.

There were some great hatches of March browns for the trout fishers and plenty of trout about. That's good news for the World Fly Fishing Championships (trout and grayling)to be held partly on the some of the lower Tay beats in June.

Tweed kelt

I sneaked away for a couple of days on the Tweed at the end of last week but had nothing to show for it. The tattiest kelt took my lure but there didn't seem to be many fresh fish coming through. Still a kelt will do just fine for some.

All the same, it was beautiful sunny weather on Friday, wading the river below the bridge in the aptly named town of Coldstream. It's why people go winter fishing.

I was fishing the lower Tweed Lennel beat that is owned by a fishing syndicate. The original syndicate bought it for about £38,000 nearly 40 years ago. A 24th share was sold last year for £160,000, valuing the beat today at more than £3.8m, a multiple of 100 during the lifetime of the syndicate. So it hasn't been a bad little investment.

The syndicate members divide their time so they have two days a month on the river. That's fine for people living in the north but it's a heck of a drag from the south for just two days.

There is another opinion, however, as my fishing companion pointed out, that anyone who has to run a business can take a couple of days without it interfering too much with their work. Another advantage of the system is that people get the chance to fish the river in all weathers, when the fish are running in numbers in October and when they are not in....er, February.

Being a Borders river it's easy to insult your Scottish-sounding ghillie by calling him a Scot when it turns out he was born in England. Equally I got it wrong with another ghillie who I thought must be English. "Och no," he said. "I'm six miles Scottish and my wife's a hundred yards English." These things matter.