or 20% down on the average for 1996 - 2008 and the other slight problem is this is a migratory fish count which doesn't really help any comparison of salmon runs at all...so still misleading. The recent trend for salmon catches on the Tyne is up and for sea trout down so some of the drop is likely to be down to sea trout but who can say?

__________________
“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

SB,

Understood, but any way one looks at those figures the Tyne is in decline and my original point was, given the levels and costs of stocking what should the appropriate reaction be to those figures?

__________________
"The sun was so delightfully warm, and the stone, which had been sitting in it for a long time, was so warm, too, that Pooh had almost decided to go on being Pooh in the middle of the stream for the rest of the morning."

www.monnow.org

Even this average is questionable. Hitherto, until 2008, the annual figure accepted has always been the E.A. figure from catch returns plus, as I understand it, some " desk re-modelling". This is the figure which has been used for the graphs. This figure was, for 2008, 763 as I remember it, but we find that from 2008 a new calculation has been used which gives us a figure of 1000 plus. Some of you will have noticed that the RWGA figure until 2008 was always in excess of the E.A. figure but since 2008 it is now some way short. For last year it seems a number of fish may have been counted twice. I understand it could be somewhere around 20-25. This was queried at the time but nothing has been done. If we then consider that the average for the last two years might be calculated from, lets say 765{ 2008} and 575{2009} we see a somewhat less exciting figure emerges. Wonderful what you can do with statistics isn't it?

I've had another look at the Tyne numbers and something else is quite interesting.

If you look at the total migratory rod catch and compare it to the number of fish through the counter. In the years with the lowest runs the catch tended to be more exploitative of the run and the reverse when the runs were larger.

The two lowest runs were 15,219 and 18,886 and the rod catch showed the two highest levels of exploitation at 24.94% and 26.24% respectively.

The four lowest lowest levels of exploitation were in the four years where the catch was highest and ranged between 8.47% and 13.15%.

What this might suggest is that the miserable Wye rod catch currently experienced represents quite a high proportion of the run. It might be worth getting the data from the counter at Redbrook and running a similar comparison.

__________________
“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

Estuary water quality

despite the billions they still struggle with pollution

That's how it might appear but the rod catches for salmon do not reflect this, we don't know the 2009 figure yet but for the years you quoted they were:

2004 - 4,122
2005 - 3,591
2006 - 3,795
2007 - 3,091
2008 - 3,389

This is a different trend to that for sea trout and the average salmon catch for these 5 years is 22% better than the average for the 10 years 1999 to 2008. It should be noted that these five years are the best ever five years catches for the Tyne so how can you be talking about decline when the preceding five seasons have been the best five seasons ever ....unless the 2009 figures are disastrous?

The other point worth making is that there is no major salmon river in England or Wales where the average salmon catch for the five years 2004 to 2008 was not better than the ten years 1999 to 2008, in some cases very significantly so. The nearest to not recording an increase was the Teifi which was just 1% up but at the other end of the scale the Eden was 41% up

__________________
“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

Someone has kindly done the work already to illustrate the positive trends in rod catches in the North-East. These don't include 2009 as these figures aren't available yet.

Tyne rod catches

yes you have missed something

Ah, I have missed something but you're not going to say what it is. Well done, a very helpful contribution to the discussion.

SB,

How does one square the circle of declining runs and increasing rod catches? Unless one knows what the annual rod catches of seatrout are and the number of rod days i.e. fishing effort? This might well come back, in part, to your figures that show a greater exploitation rate on lower runs.

__________________
"The sun was so delightfully warm, and the stone, which had been sitting in it for a long time, was so warm, too, that Pooh had almost decided to go on being Pooh in the middle of the stream for the rest of the morning."

www.monnow.org