Troubled Waters

The salmon-poaching scandal

Charles Darwin would have loved the British salmon, school of 83. Returning this month as they do annually from their far-flung North Atlantic feeding grounds to rivers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales where they were spawned, the great game fish face a hazardous course that only the fittest survive. Along the way they are likely to encounter far more than the simple lures of sportsmen who gladly pay up to $3,000 a week for riverbank angling rights. The fish must also run an illicit gauntlet of nets, gaffs, snares, spears, dynamite, electric shocks, even poison, believed to be cy-mag, a cyanide-based white powder that sucks the oxygen out of the water and turns every asphyxiated fish belly up within a two-mile area. Reaching river's end after such an ordeal, male salmon are probably too pooped to papa.

The British government appears to think so. Last month the National Water Council, which represents regional water authorities in England and Wales, issued its grimmest report ever on the state of the salmon. Illegal catches--the council refrained from using the word poaching--have become so heavy that in some areas they are double the legal catch. Even though the government is spending $4 million annually on a force of 245 water bailiffs to combat illegal fishing in English and Welsh rivers, the salmon may face extinction.

The reasons are largely economic. Any enterprising poacher can easily earn $750 a night by netting, poisoning, gaffing or otherwise coaxing salmon out of British streams and selling them for $3 per lb., more for the choicest steaks, to restaurants. Nick Sanders, manager of the Cothi Bridge Hotel about six miles east of Carmarthen in south Wales, is one of the few restaurateurs willing to admit as much. "If the fish comes in at a reasonable price, I'll buy it," he says. "Poaching has always gone on in Wales. It's like kids bobbing for apples." The penalty for getting caught, by contrast, can be as little as $15.

Such economic considerations have changed what was once a chivalrous game into a nasty business. In the old days, poachers and water bailiffs both took a more romantic view of things. Says Dai Thomas, 60, a retired mechanic and sometime poacher from St. Clears, Wales, who was taught the art at the age of eight by his father: "I love poaching. It's a sport. I know where the fish hides, in the deep pools at the banks underneath the roots. I tickle the salmon. He thinks I'm playing with him, which makes me sad because once I touch him he won't move. I slip the rabbit snare over his tail and jerk him out of the water. But as I get older, I find the fish looking at me, so nice, and then I say, 'Go on, have another chance,' and I throw it back." Derrick Worthington, 49, a former Royal Marine who has been a water bailiff for 14 years on Wales' Pembrokeshire rivers, feels that "any bailiff who says the adrenaline isn't flowing when he is out stalking is lying." Worthington spends up to 80 hours a week stalking riverbanks for poachers, using night-light telescopes to spy on them.

But now poaching has become a growth industry, taken over by gangs who shanghai salmon the way more conventional bandits rob banks. Today's poachers use radio-equipped lookouts to check for water bailiffs, sophisticated systems of decoy cars to deploy their forces and middlemen to market their take. The object: big catches, swiftly and efficiently distributed. The only weapon the government men have is a truncheon, which, under antiquated rules, can be drawn only in self-defense. The poachers, meanwhile, sport a growing assortment of weapons.

One proposed solution is a salmon-tagging stratagem similar to one used successfully in Canada. Legally caught salmon are tagged by the head or tail. Anyone--fisherman, merchant, even restaurateur--who handles an untagged fish could be liable to a sizable fine. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.