Photo: Undefined Flyfishing Project.
It was only a few weeks into the salmon season that everyone realised that something was wrong – something was off. The salmon weren’t there. It has happened before that the initial early season run s delayed and that was what everyone hoped for. As the season progressed hope began to fade as most rivers still produced very few salmon.
If it happened in one or two rivers that would be it, so to say, but this happened across many, many rivers in Europe. Over 30 rivers in Norway closed for fishing completely. One in Denmark continued on a C&R basis, others remained open, but there’s no doubt – something was and hopefully not is very wrong.
Numerous theories and suggestions were conjured up and none better or worse than others.The fact is that we still don’t know the reasons. A few things do stand out, probably not as the explanation for this years missing salmon, but as a significant threat to salmon, especially in Norway, Scotland and elsewhere, where the salmon farming industry mass produce salmon in open pens in the fjords. They quickly become the perfect habitat for sea lice. We used to enjoy catching a liced salmon. Sea lice survive only up to 72 hours in freshwater before falling off. So a silvery salmon with lice is proof that the fish is indeed very fresh in the river. Now a liced salmon just remind us of the disaster that open pen salmon farming is. The populations of sea lice are so dense in and around the pens that smolt are often attacked by so many lice that they simply die, before even making it out of the fjord.
Even in a best case scenario very, very few salmon return to spawn and we certainly don’t need massive threats like the ones posed by the open salmon pens to make the situation worse.
So what’s the status? It seems nobody knows. I’ve heard rumours that a few Norwegian rivers has had very good runs of salmon after the season closed. If that’s true, maybe others have too. Someone suggested early on that the changes that seems to be happening in the Gulf Current had led the salmon on a big detour – let’s hope that’s true and that they are back, just in time to spawn.
We have no status – I don’t think there even is a status. Only a few rivers have fish counters and on all the others, we know nothing. Had they allowed fishing for the last two weeks of the season, even just the last (C&R of course) we’d have a idea. Had authorities opened for a week after the season closed to let teams of accomplished fishers go through the best pools and really fish the down, then we’d have an idea.
It’s a deeply frustrating situation for everybody involved. Will we be allowed to fish next year? What will the conditions be? I’m certain the land owners are already having trouble selling the weeks for 2025. Can they make it without the income? The local communities are potentially looking at a big drop in income if visiting fishers stay home.
I hope that authorities after all know something – that studies have been carried out that might be released over the winter, so at least we’ll know more before April 16th, when the Danish salmon rivers open, June 1st, where the Norwegian rivers open and so on.
Photo: Undefined Flyfishing Project.
The situation in Northern Sweden that our friends at Undefined Flyfishing have been writing about is the same and they have been producing content to be released over the coming weeks and months.
This is a bit of a gloomy blog and I’m sorry about that, but it’s of course an issue that needs attention from all angles.