River Lochy anglers reel in 144 suspected escaped salmon
A focused effort by anglers on the River Lochy has caught 144 salmon suspected to have escaped from a pen at Mowi Scotland’s Gorsten fish farm in Loch Linnhe during Storm Amy in the first weekend in October.
Around 75,000 fish with an average weight of 860 grams escaped through a tear in a net after the storm caused mooring anchors to drag, bringing the pen net into contact with a flotation pipe.
The fish caught in the Lochy have ranged from 2lb (approximately 900 grams) to 6lb (2.7 kg), according to information submitted to the Lochaber District Salmon Fishery Board (Lochaber DSFB).
Big but immature
The Board’s secretary, Jon Gibb, said it was possible the fish reported as 6lb could have been weighed poorly, but that there were several fish caught that were around 5lbs.
He added that the caught fish were being cut open to check for milt and eggs, and none of the fish was sexually mature, regardless of its size.
Mowi Scotland chief operating officer Ben Hadfield said he couldn’t rule out the possibility of one of the escaped fish weighing 6lb because a population can have outliers, although that was unlikely among 75,000 fish.
“It wouldn’t be the first time that a fisherman has exaggerated the weight of a fish,” added Hadfield wryly.
He confirmed that all the escaped fish were from one pen, and that all the other pens on the site had been inspected and were intact.
'Gross exaggerations'
Hadfield also took issue with media reports about the potential for the escaped salmon to interbreed with wild salmon and further threaten their viability.
“We take this event seriously, we regret the escape, and we’re committed to work with local fisheries but the doomsday projections reported in The National and on the BBC will in a few years time be seen for what they are, gross exaggerations,” said the Mowi Scotland chief.
When 48,000 fish escaped from a farm at Carradale during another named wetaher event, Storm Ellen, in 2020, Mowi funded work to discover whether the fish had interbred with the wild population, and found the escape had almost no detectable impact.
“There were 5,300 wild fish that were analysed in the rivers after that event, and only one of them had any kind of link to aquaculture ancestry,” said Hadfield.
“We’ll do the same type of study on the River Lochy and what it will show is that most of these [escaped] fish succumb to predation, and it will also show that predation is a massive problem for wild fish because most of the fish on the River Lochy succumb to predation anyway.
“I live overlooking the catchment and I can wake up in the morning and see rafts of mergansers out on the loch. There are also seals in Loch Linnhe, six or seven miles upstream.”
