 First of all, thank you very much indeed for coming, a very warm welcome to you all, I'm sorry about the rather inclement weather. I'm Brian Doran, I'm the current chairman of the Spade District Salmon Fishery Board and with me I have Duncan Ferguson who is our operations manager and I just like Duncan to just outline exactly what his role is and his responsibilities and all of the issues that he's been dealing with over the last year and looking forward to dealing with in the future. Duncan. Well I kind of look after the whole catchment, if we look after a very large river it's 112 miles long with 560 miles of tributaries, it comes out at 3,000 square kilometres of a catchment so within that catchment there's always lots of things to do whether it's working with distillers, working with water abstraction, working with the Julian of the A9 just now, lots of bridge culverts and opportunities there to work with the new A9 people to enhance access for fish that's maybe been a bit of a problem in the past, also quite involved with the habitat enhancement work so you know looking at things that were done in the past, rivers that were canalised and we work very closely with SEPA and SNH and they you know we work closely together to get the benefit and the best benefit for the river. Duncan I wonder maybe it may not be obvious to people watching this, just exactly why somebody involved with salmon fishing might be interested in the dueling of the A9 and the effect that that would have on salmon, could you perhaps just say a few words about the impact of things like major road projects and culverts and migrating fish and fry and all of these sort of issues. Well major infrastructure projects they you know create opportunities to fix things that happened in the past so you know 20 years ago 30 years ago people weren't maybe so aware of the problems with fish so they maybe put a pipe in that fish couldn't access but also we'd spend a lot of time working with these developers very closely to mitigate against you know pollution events maybe like some taken invasive non-natives into the catchment and tracks of diggers just little things like that so you're looking looking through their method statements but everything relates so anything that flows into the river spay that or could flow into the river spay we try to get involved with so you know even you know making sure all these developers have all their silt traps in place so the spawning reds aren't getting choked up with silt and things like that for coming off these major works and the other issue of course we're facing these days is the the increasing growth of the wind farm community and we're not only on land but also we've got some offshore wind farms now which are of real concern to us because what they're doing is affecting the or possibly affecting the migration of the smolts as they leave the fresh water and going out into the feeding grounds in North Atlantic we don't yet know what the effect is of electromagnetic influence on those fish does it does it affect them does it upset the navigation but a lot of work being done there and we're involved in a lot of that Duncan is involved a lot of that monitoring of the effects of it as of course as Brian show our biologists who is leading a leading player in this field and that's becoming a big issue for us wind farms yeah we also have the wind farms in the upper catchment as well and the fringes as well so you know all these big infrastructure projects you look at them as an opportunity you know there might be sources of funding through these things for you know to develop more research I think we all have a very good under swell we we think we've got a good understanding of what happens in the river itself but when they go to see smolts are an unknown entity and there's a lot more research to be done there yeah climate's changing for instance last December the spay was 220 percent higher than normal for the whole of December so just little things like that you know how do we mitigate about what's going to happen in the future and climate is very interesting because the fish at sea when they go to see and feed the the the small fish that they feed on tend to like very cold water the sand deals caper and that sort of thing the average north Atlantic temperature has increased by just over one cent a great degree doesn't sound a lot to us but it's a massive amount from an ecological perspective and and the effect of that in the Atlantic is to drive the bait fish of the food north further north so the the smolts of an even further longer distance to go and it's a more hazardous journey so they they they struggle to get there and also struggle to get back so the so that we just don't understand yet the survivability of that and that is a climate to change effect that's something we need to understand more about as Duncan touched on the the the the migration path we don't yet really understand and it's really quite surprising that we don't after so many years but we are now beginning some serious work into trying to track the migration routes of these fish and the effect of various man-made structures such as oil rigs and all wells and what have you on on on the the the small it's going to see another factor of course is aquaculture now people have tended to think that's just a west coast problem what it is a west coast problem of course primarily that's where the majority of the fish farms are but there is now some suggestion that fish are coming around the top of the coming around the top of Scotland and are actually being affected by some of the fish farms that are now appearing around the shepherds and it's well known now that sea lice are an increasing issue and we know that sea lice tend to congregate around the the estuaries of the rivers particularly and they of course particularly affect the sea trite which tend to stay closer in shore than the salmon and are affected by the sea lice more but sea lice around fish farms around around the shepherds is becoming something more important to us and we're looking at it more and the effect of that on salmon that are coming to our east coast rivers so it does have an effect so these are things that we perhaps did know about but didn't really understand the the impact of them and there's a lot of work going on with that I think water abstraction generally is a big issue for us because with the focus now on renewable energy there is greater pressure on our catchment and people trying to take water away from the catchment to generate electricity which in itself is commendable but we can't benefit from the one at the expense of the the wild salmon so there has to be a balance and that's what we're trying to achieve you know we're not trying to ban these things or stop these things but we just need to try and find what we lost we lose 49% of the average pay before the reaches can you see with water abstraction so you know we've lost that water either going west for smelting timba smelting aluminium in Fort William or you know transferred south into the Tay system for hydro power you know and if you remove 49% of a river the river starts to you know adapt to being a smaller and when you do get significant events the river doesn't function properly so the river is actually getting smaller and smaller in upper catchment because there's not enough water coming down the river to make the river function properly I mean the smaller the wetted area the bigger reduction wetted area the less juvenile fish that area can support then we have other issues like man-made barriers one that we're very focused on at the moment is spay dam where we have some concerns that we're not finding any sensible numbers of juvenile fish above the dam which suggests to us that the dam is not allowing these fish to get past the migratory fish to get past and we're looking at the fish past there and the dam itself thanks to a lot of pressure put on by the spay more over a number of years has now been classified by SIPA as a barrier to migratory fish now that's quite interesting but the actual impact of that is that under the European water framework directive there is a requirement to maintain what is known as good economic ecological potential and SIPA have now will now require the owners of the dam which is Rio Tinto to make sure that the fish past is fit for purpose and that migrating fish can get up into the headwaters to spawn and there's something like I think it's around 19 kilometers of excellent habitat above the dam which currently is not being used so SIPA's initiative there driven largely by the efforts of the spay board and particularly my predecessor Alan Williams who spearheaded this with Roger Knight our director I think has has helped help this this change to come about and I think that will have a major effect on the river one of the one of the major changes over the last 12 18 months or so has been the wild fisheries management review now this was this was actually commissioned by Alex Salmon the previous first minister when he opened the River Tay in January 2014 and mr. Salmon asked Andrew Finn the who was chairman of Scottish National Heritage asked him to conduct a review of wild fishery management practices throughout Scotland and to review those practices and comment on their suitability and applicability to salmon fishing and sat and river management today initially that caused quite a lot of unrest because there was some concern that this was a politically driven issue and there was some underlying motive here that we were a little bit concerned about Andrew Finn conducted this report very quickly over about six months and he started in January and he reported in October to the Scottish government he produced a report with 53 separate recommendations a huge range of proposals regarding the way fisheries ought to be managed into the 21st century and and going forward the government responded to that and we we had a consultation came out I think in May last year which asked 38 questions and we spent most of last year and various subcommittees and discussing and debating our response to these issues and the introduce a very controversial issues such as their proposal regarding a license to kill salmon did we need to have a license to kill salmon to aid conservation we talked they talked about netting they talked about carcass tagging there were all sorts of issues that were came with something of a shock to us we argued the case fairly robustly particularly regarding the license to kill because the conservation approach by most anglers certainly on this river here on the spay the attitude is tremendous I mean we have over 90% of fish being returned the fish court so we couldn't see that there was any conservation benefit to be gained from licensing to kill creating a license to kill in fact we could see it as a positive problem because if we produced a license and the license was going to be based on a quota which was going to be based on sustainability the mechanism to establish that was not defined in the in the consultation at all but our concern was that that if they establish a code of X number of fish that would become a target and that are made we may end up with actually more fish being killed than we had with voluntary conservation catch of voluntary catch release which which we've been operating for many many years as indeed had many other rivers in Scotland so we argued that there was no real conservation benefit to be gained from licensing the rod fishery that we did argue of course that there was a significant conservation benefit to be gained if there was some control imposed on the net fishery now the net fishery which is a perfectly legal means of catching fish and all of the netsmen operate under heritable rights licenses they've had for generations in some cases so there's no suggestion that the netsmen are doing anything illegal just that what they're doing is that they are killing a hundred percent of the fish we catch or they catch rather whereas we're returning 94% in the case of the spale last year if you like we are borrowing fish from the river and they're putting them back the netsmen kill a hundred percent and those fish never go on to spawn and that is the issue and the netsmen didn't seem to be too well controlled at all so we argued this aggressively with the government and I'm and together with colleagues from other major rivers particularly and other some of the smaller rivers as well we made a very strong case to the government I'm very pleased to say that the government listened to our arguments and they did in fact decide that there was not a case for licensing and instead they introduced a system of categorizing the rivers one two or three and basically that that was based on their conservation history shall we say and those rivers which had a demonstrated history of meeting a target over the last five years were not required to do anything at all there were the category one rivers such as this one here the spay where the return rate was such that there was no there was nothing more could be done and the the number of fish that were being killed were well below the sustainable level on the in the river category two rivers where they were maintaining a reasonable level of conservation and catch and release and sustainability but not as good as it could be and they were going to be asked to improve their conservation policy and the category three rivers were those who were unable to demonstrate that they had an adequate conservation policy at all and that has resulted in them having a 100% catch and release law rule imposed on them and so this is all being going on all this year and this district fishery board and others have been very actively working to respond to this consultation which we did in the summer of this year and and I please say just just last week Roger Knight the director and Duncan and myself we attended a meeting in Pitlockery at Marine Science Scotland where the minister Dr. McLeod introduced the draft legislation which is going to be laid before Parliament later on this year and that was yet another consultation but it was a consultation which was drafted in a way that suggested they had listened to what we were saying I think that is really quite impressive and I think that what happened was as they continued through this this review following Andrew Thin's report I think they came to realize that the district salmon fishery boards and the way they had been managing the rivers over the last 150 years in our case I think it's 163 years was actually pretty good and we done a pretty reasonable job and that in fact we they didn't really need to take it apart and rebuild it that doesn't mean it can't be improved it certainly can be improved and we're all playing our part in trying to influence the government's thinking and we'll continue to do that so I'm reasonably comfortable now and I think most of us are that we are going to end up with a reasonably sensible reform of wild fisheries management in Scotland which ultimately will to be will be to the benefit of the salmon which of course the prime aim of all that we do and if we benefit the salmon we of course also benefit the local economies in the case of space side here salmon fishing is probably worth somewhere around 12 15 million pounds a year and that's in a contribution to the Scottish economy generally of probably somewhere over 200 million a year so ultimately this is everybody benefits