Gaula Why protecting big salmon is the key to Harvesting
With the events of 2024 now in the rear view mirror, some of us are marching willingly toward the new banner of salmon sustainability and protection while others are more hesitant, hostile even. It’s a seemingly unbridgeable gap between those who want to catch and kill salmon and those that support catch and release.
Yet, our interests might be more aligned than you think because it’s my belief that we can continue to harvest a proportion of salmon while at the same time protecting them. The key is in the protection. For years, we have killed a huge number of big salmon without regard for the consequences and it is clear that we are placing the river and its salmon, especially its big salmon, under too much pressure.
For many years, I have been criticised in certain quarters because of my belief in catch and release as a vital tool in fishery management. Most of our guests at the lodge have no desire to kill the fish they catch and the vast majority understand the need to release them for the benefit of the river. It’s not a hard sell. Yet, the willingness of anglers to release fish brings a benefit to those who want to harvest salmon. Other fishing lodges have a similar situation and represent approximately 30 percent of the water on the river. Imagine if we were killing as many fish as possible in the past few years and the additional burden it would have placed on the stock! It’s my belief that neither faction should view the other as the enemy but should understand the nature of the relationship in which the anglers paying the largest amounts have the smallest impact on fish stocks.
Who Should be Allowed to Harvest and How do we Do it?
Harvesting for future generations can be protected too – by ensuring that we take only a sustainable amount of salmon and not the big fish. Big female fish are especially sacrosanct and future harvesting numbers should be estimated in close collaboration with scientific experts. In short, we need to be more surgical and selective in our approach.
Of course, we cannot continue to harvest fish in such numbers without consequences. We can certainly preserve harvesting rights for locals and landowners. However, tourists from other countries do not expect to kill salmon for the most part and nor should they expect to. Helping yourself to one of our most valuable local resources is no longer justifiable and if you want to fish on one of the best salmon rives in the world, you should abide by the rules and release the fish.
Quotas
How we arrive at a quota is open to discussion. There are those that favour personal quotas and those that favour total season quotas. If we want to offer limited catch and kill tickets to tourists, we can do so with a high price tag attached. Protection of female fish and big salmon is baked in but the numbers of small to medium fish should vary from season to season. The quota should be set at a sustainable level and under the advice of scientists according to the run we can expect and adjusted at short notice in the event of catastrophe like the one we experienced last year.
If we opt for a season quota system, strict numbers would be enforced and once the threshold set by the river board is reached, harvesting will no longer take place. This system puts a hard limit on the fish that can be taken and is open to adjustment at short notice.
Personal quotas have their advocates too, the advantage being that fish will probably not get killed up to the limit because those holding quotas may not achieve 100 percent of their quota.
A Vision for the Future of the River
As Norway embraces a new direction it brings with it a host of opportunities. Chief among these is the chance to reduce the number of anglers on the river and to improve the quality of the individual angling experience. The current board views excessive angling pressure as a success but in reality it involves chronic underselling of a prime resource with profound consequences. As more anglers rush to the river to take their share, the numbers of salmon that can spawn reduces. As the angler numbers continue to climb, the fish numbers are declining and there is a crossover point. We reached that crossover point of dwindling individual angling returns quite some time ago. Our reputation as being open to anyone and everyone has resulted in a reducing fish population and fish that are becoming harder to catch because they are being fished for round the clock. We are also attracting more anglers who want to kill fish. There are now very few major salmon rivers in the world that would allow the slaughter of so many of their big fish and yet we have worn it like a badge of virtue.
The mix of anglers fishing Gaula is important. This is not about elitist fishing, it’s about a sustainable river in which anglers who are prepared to fish catch and release are allowing others the opportunity to harvest fish.
The makeup of the river is fragmented but the presence of the areas that see higher numbers of released fish allow the areas with lower rates to continue. There will always need to be sanctuary areas of the river and these are currently provided by the higher profile fishing lodges with international customers. The future for the river lies in balancing the revenues that international anglers will bring against the cost to the resource (which is very low). This will allow harvesting of fish in other areas of the river where the revenue is low and the cost to the resource extremely high.
Gaula’s brightest future lies in being a well protected river with sustainable rules and less angling pressure. The huge improvement in individual angling experience will bring improved revenues for landowners and less stress on the resource. With worldwide salmon stocks under huge pressure, creating rules that assume an increase in salmon numbers is folly.
When the process of protection begins to take effect, the reputation of the river will grow and demand to fish will increase. The resource will be less stressed and as revenues increase we can begin to take on some issues that have long held the river back.
There have been discussions about installing fish counters on Gaula and this would be a valuable management tool which we have been lacking for many years. The lack of transparency about the numbers of fish entering the river allows deceptions to take place about the percentage of fish caught more than once and an assumption that there are more fish in the river than there are.
The extent of smoke and mirrors in the management of this river is debatable. What is not debatable is that the rules for the river are often based on a willingness to increase the number of big fish that can be killed regardless of the fact that every red light on the dashboard is flashing. In the future, we should base our management plans under strict advice from scientific experts with a regard not to what we can take from the river but what we can give back to it for a better future. This is a fundamental paradigm shift in thinking and it’s called putting the river first. Our task is not to squander this opportunity but to embrace it and find a way forward that protects our prime asset without damaging local tradition and harvesting rights.
The installation of fish counters would offer us a huge opportunity to create rules which match up to reality of the stock. This combined with the overlay of scientific advice would tell us how many fish we can harvest and allow both short-term and long-term informed choices to be made.
The Dreaded Nets
The second major elephant in the room is the presence of the nets in the Trondheimsfjord. Historical angling rights have been protected for many years and the numbers of fish lost to the nets is alarmingly high. Negotiating a compensation package and a deal to take the nets away will have the greatest uplift on the river’s fortunes that we can imagine and the improvement in the fishing would be huge. Getting a deal is far from easy but we should at least be willing to look at this and form a serious Taskforce if we want to give the river a super-charge in its chances of survival in the long term.
If we protect our big salmon we can also protect harvesting rights for the people that deserve them the most – locals and landowners. The alternative is a river that is more frequently closed to fishing and open for short bursts of harvesting. There are those among us who would prefer the latter but for those of us who want to maintain rod and line fishing on Gaula, the choice is a “no brainer.” Our futures lie in working together to a proper framework that preserves our precious gem of a river for many future generations to come. A wind of change is blowing and it’s time to get in step. Ask not what the river can do for us but what we can do for the river.
