 Okay well we're glad to be here at opening day again. Opening day is always a great day. Gets rid of the winter blues and back fishing. That's great to see. What can we expect this year? Well we can never predict what's going to happen in salmon fishing but if we can go by the last few years then we might have some reason to be hopeful about the spring fishing because the last number of years we have been seeing the spring fishing improving on the day. Although last year was a little bit down on the recent trend but what we can't say about last year was that the average weight of fish caught in the early part of the spring say up to the end of March was the biggest highest for quite a number of decades. Indeed the average weight was £12.8 from our records and you've really got to go back to the 1950s before it was consistently higher than that. You might say well what's going on? Well the real reason for this is that we seem to be seeing something of a resurgence of these he went to fish. You go back 15 years ago most of the fish that were caught here at this time of year tended to be fish around £8, £9 with the occasional bigger one and these were mainly 2C winter fish. Whereas what we've seen in recent years is more fish in the teens some in the high teens of pounds and some fish over 20. These are fish that have spent three years at sea. These are the sort of fish that the Tay in the past used to be renowned for. So one good thing is to say we are seeing some bigger fish here and so if you catch a fish in the early part of the day season now it's likely to be a cracker. But the downside of that has been in the water part of the season in the autumn in the last few years we've been seeing less fresh fish and indeed last year there weren't many fresh fish at all in the water part of the season and that was true not just here but really throughout Scotland and rivers that they expect to have a big back end run. Why? Well partly we can see the same sort of phenomenon going back say in the 1950s there was a time when most Scottish rivers were dominated by spring fish and there were poor autumn runs and is it the case that we're going back into the same sort of cycle that's where people have been asking. Perhaps we are or perhaps we're going to be seeing something which is going to be slightly different. The two things that are common between the present time and back then is that sea temperatures in the North Atlantic were relatively high both then and now and would seem to be still increasing and it may be that fish that used to come back as grills are staying at sea longer to find feeding or to travel further north and therefore assuming they do survive to get back they're coming back as older and bigger fish. It's not actually that fish are growing faster it's just that they're staying at sea longer in order to attain a weight for spawning and that may be part of the reason that we're seeing these trends at the moment. So the overall picture is to say we can't predict what's going to happen in 2018 but based on what happened last year if it does transpire that we don't have a good grills run then we are asking anglers really to go easy and only take the occasional fish later in the season but to say the upside is that if you come fishing here in the spring particularly and if you do get a fish then if last year is anything to go by the chances are it might be a really good one and as I say the day was always famed for producing big springers and so if you want to catch a good fish this is the place to come.