Endangered species at work

Katrina Porteous goes after some sea-trout with a Northumberland fisherman

The adult brown trout, which may have spent years in a river, can decide to migrate to sea and return the following year as a much larger (sea) trout, with silver colouration

Black-speckled, metallic, silvery brilliant, seven freshly caught sea-trout lie in their fish box on the deck of Edward’s boat, as neatly-packed as an oversized tin of sardines. It’s a beautiful, clear May morning on the Northumberland coast, real warmth in the sun, a light north east breeze chilling my skin and slightly ruffling the sea. Edward douses the fish with sea water from a pail, covers them with a wet hessian sack, and turns to row out again to his nets.

The bay glitters. Diamonds drip from the oar blades as Edward ships them, to pull the boat along the length of the nets, cork by cork, checking for fish. Around 150 metres of white floats stretch out from the pier, ending in a ‘tick’ shape, where small anchors secure them in the dazzling blue water of the bay. Edward’s boat is a modern, fibreglass version of a traditional Northumbrian coble, scaled down to enable one man to handle it easily under oars.

Sometimes Edward is joined by another fisherman, John, who rows while Edward grapples the fish from the net. John has been fishing since the late 1950s and says that he feels a little creakier this year than last. In a few months he will turn 90. Edward is in his late 60s and is the last fisherman licensed to catch sea-trout in Beadnell bay.

I’ve been coming here in late spring and summer for most of my life to watch the netsmen ‘on the beach’. Until a few years ago, salmon were caught here, too – generally grilse, young fish returning to the rivers to spawn after their first winter at sea, netted in modest numbers, later in the season. Although John remembers his grandfather’s tales of big salmon caught close to shore – one, netted at the end of the 1800s, was said to have weighed 60 pounds – this bay, with no river until the Tweed 20 miles to the north, was traditionally better for sea-trout than for salmon. Sea-trout are closely related to salmon and are, like them, migratory, but they are a different species. Salmon were caught in larger numbers a little farther out to sea, using drift nets.

Sea fishing from this beach is a very old tradition; but catching salmon at sea only became popular in the 19^th century. Historically, most salmon and sea-trout were caught in rivers and estuaries, and catches were highly regulated – before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540, by the Church, and after that by landowners. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries enormous numbers of salmon were netted on rivers. In 1816 alone, 300,000 were exported from the Tweed. Sea fishing for salmon only became popular in the 19^th century, as landowners developed enormous ‘stake nets’, stretching for hundreds of metres. Licences were introduced on this part of the coast in the 20^th century, to protect sea fishermen from part-timers. But in the 1980s and 90s salmon numbers began to decline steeply. Northumbrian drift netsmen felt assailed by ever-increasing regulation, imposed upon them by a government under pressure from landowners, river anglers and conservationists, who formed the Atlantic Salmon Trust.