End of line as last fish landed on iconic beat
IT is one of the most iconic stretches of salmon river in Scotland.
The Doonfoot beat on the River Doon is immortalised in poem and even on the back of a £5 note.
But the owner of the beat has now been forced to close its banks to anglers because there aren’t enough fish to catch.
The Doonfoot beat used to produce fabulous catches for anglers, who came from all over the UK.
Twenty years ago they landed an astonishing 969 salmon from the 1¾mile stretch that runs under the Brig o’Doon at Alloway, featured on the back of the Bank of Scotland’s £5 note, and made famous by Robert Burns in his poem Tam o’ Shanter.
Last year, anglers tempted only 27 from the beat, and this year, with the season almost finished, catches will not fare much better.
The beat was once a magnet for fishermen, who had to wait for ‘dead men’s shoes’ before they could get on. Since catches began to drop, so did the numbers of anglers.
Local businessman David Cosh, who bought Doonfoot 20 years ago, has now written to his anglers telling them he is closing the beat.
Mr Cosh claims he is witnessing the extinction of wild salmon and blames salmon farming and the Scottish Government’s failure to provide legislation to force their owners to control sea lice, which eat the young fish alive, disease and escapees breeding with wild fish.
The picturesque stretch with a ghillie is almost certainly the first salmon beat in Scotland to be shut down because of lack of fish.
Mr Cosh, who was in the wine and spirits business, recalls the magical days 20 years ago when he first bought the beat from a netting company, which scooped up the shoals of salmon in its estuary.
Anglers were catching so many salmon that he asked them for restraint, urging them to just keep what they needed for the pot and to let the others swim away.
His letter to anglers explains that in tandem with diminishing catches, anglers who fished the river for years have been staying at home, culminating in the beat losing money over the past three years as he has strug- gled to keep it open. The letter includes a graph showing the decline over the past 20 years.
Mr Cosh said: ‘The average annual catch for our first five years was 469. The next five years saw it drop to 243, and for the five years after that, to 190.
‘In a bid to help the salmon I spent a lot of money and effort building and running a hatchery for the river, but it was all to no avail.
‘Three of the last five years saw the annual catch drop into double figures, and then last year we reached an all-time low.
‘The whole of the West Coast of Scotland has seen wild salmon becoming an endangered species. Many rivers are still being fished but on a total catch and release basis.
‘But now we are seeing what I believe to be the extinction of these wonderful fish. I hold every Scottish fisheries minister over the years of the Scottish parliament personally responsible for the dramatic decline of wild salmon stocks.
‘The clear-to-see cause, supported by countless evidence-based reports, is the unregulated growth of salmon farms, which are set up with very little monitoring.’
Earlier this week it emerged that the Tay had suffered its worst autumn fishing spell for 13 years.
The number of salmon caught on the Tay slumped to 6,000 from last year’s 7,000 – the lowest number since 2003.
‘Last year was an all-time low’