Hampshire Avon 2023

Where are the fish?
One thing is for certain they are not where they should be. So where do we look?

The migration routes and the depths the fish swim at can be tracked with a level of accuracy less than a hundred metres. It is not new technology and has been used to position tuna traps so precisely one trap in the Eastern Atlantic caught its entire seasons quota in one day.
Fit the same technology to a couple of mega sized pair trawlers and the value of the catch could be astronomical.

Has anyone examined the losses of juveniles even before they go to the sea?
Most salmon rivers are coarse fished, use maggots and the numbers of salmon parr caught are higher than on any other bait, a good percentage of those caught will gorge the hook and when returned many drift off to be quickly cleared up by the ever present seagull.
Salmon evolved to live alongside herons, now we have egrets which feed in a different manner than herons and cormorants which fly up and down our rivers targeting every slack and slow water where there isn't a human presence.

Do anyone know what happens when the smolts enter the sea? Do you think they swim off quite happily to grow and get fat.....because they don't! I know one river (mentioned above) where a good percentage are very quickly mopped up by the hundreds of gulls that hang around waiting for an easy meal when the smolts are driven to the surface by predators underneath. I doubt those gulls or cormorants were there a few decades ago when fish were returning in good numbers.

Does anyone undertake DNA sampling of the salmon being sold in this country? The US do it to control illegal marketing of certain species so why could we not do it for salmon?

The fact is the way things are going chalkstream salmon are in the fast lane to becoming an endangered species and once the gene pool gets that low there will be no route back.

Sorry Red Spinner, but you're miles off on the Parr and maggot front. Coarse Anglers spend a lifetime of unhooking and returning fish. A small hook such as one used in maggot fishing these days is likely to be micro barbed in the least and just as likely to be barbless too. Even if a Parr has gobbed a maggot, modern plastic micro disgorgers will have such hooks out in a jiffy with nary a scratch. In fact there'll be a higher attrition rate to parr from bona fide Salmon anglers, many of whom have never had to worry about releasing or handling protocols for fish they catch until very recent times. How many Salmon anglers still use an old pair of pliers from the garage to unhook fish and as yet have not embraced modern hooks or even gone barbless yet!.
This isn't a personal dig at all, Wear Anglers moan about F.E.B's and such like, the Wye its water quality, the Dee it's Seals and Dolphins in the estuary up on the Ribble its intensive farming and agricultural run off
It's easy to blame what we all can see, but every single river in the UK and world wide is rapidly accelerating towards migratory fish extinction, it's a common problem for all, not a single problem for one river and another problem for another. Don't know if you've noticed, but Salmon Angling is being banned in rivers Stateside now, so low are the returning numbers.
So far, there 5 Salmon caught for the entire Ribble this season! ( or there were on Weds.! ). I'm sure each rivers own little foibles won't be doing returning numbers any good, but there's greater dragons to slay- initially any way!
Why do you think any form of stocking is constantly denied?, because our Government knows what's happening to the fish, they are not going to apportion funds to stock rivers when they're netted out on the open sea!. Obviously, not going to sponsor other country's to feed their populations, or put profit into others peoples pockets.
Pedro.