2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen Read online

I saw where this was going.

  ‘Well, there are a few problems with that idea,’ I suggested. This time Harriet crossed her legs, a movement that somehow caught my eye, and clasped her hands around her knees and looked at me critically, just as I had tried to do to her a moment or two earlier.

  ‘Let’s go through some of them,’ she suggested.

  ‘First, water,’ I said. ‘Salmon are fish. Fish need water.’ Harriet only looked at me when I said that, so I had to continue. ‘Specifically, as I said in my letter, salmon need cool, well-oxygenated water. The temperature should ideally not exceed eighteen degrees Celsius. The best conditions are rivers fed by snow melt or springs, although some varieties of salmon can live in lakes if they are deep and cool enough. So there’s a fundamental problem, right there.’

  Harriet stood up and went across to her desk, took a file from it and then sat down again.

  Opening the file she said, ‘Water. Parts of the Yemen have up to 250 millimetres of rainfall a month in the wet summer season. It is brushed by the monsoon, like parts of the Dhofar region in the south of Oman. On top of surface water run-off from the summer storms, there is constant recharging of the groundwater. People didn’t use to think there was much groundwater in the Yemen but since they started looking for oil they have found one or two big new aquifers. So, yes, water is a huge problem, but there is water there. The wadis become rivers, and pools and lakes form in the summer.’

  This was surprising.

  ‘Then there is the question of water temperature. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Yemen isn’t that hot, but if it is, the oxygen will leave the water and the fish will die.’

  Harriet looked at her file again and said, ‘We’re thinking mountains. That’s where the rain is, and the elevations in the central highlands go up to over 3000 metres. At that height the temperatures are bearable. The night-time temperatures go down to well below twenty Celsius even in the summer. And Pacific salmon get as far south as California—as long as the water is aerated, they seem to be able to survive. I don’t mean to be telling you your business, Dr Jones; just that it might not be as open and shut as you first thought.’

  I paused, and then said, ‘Salmon parr feed off certain types of fly life, and if we introduced salmon from English rivers they would only recognise food that came from those rivers.’

  ‘Perhaps that can be introduced along with the fish? There are plenty of flies in the Yemen, at any rate. English ones might adapt if the local fly life didn’t taste good.’ She closed her file with a snap and looked at me with a smile.

  ‘Then,’ I said with mounting irritation, ‘the salmon parr grow up into smolts, and the smolts want to find the sea, and the particular part of the sea they want to find is just south of Iceland—at least if the fish broodstock comes from an English or Scottish river. How do you suppose these fish will get there? Through the Suez Canal?’

  ‘Well,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘that’s one of the problems you would have to solve, of course. But if it was me, and of course I’m a completely non-technical person, I’d think along the lines of constructing holding ponds at the bottom of the wadis seeded with salmon, keeping the water cool, injecting it with oxygen if necessary, and confining the salmon there for three or four years. I read somewhere that in Canada salmon stay in the lake systems for that amount of time.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Catch them all, then start again?’ She stood up, looking at her watch. ‘Dr Jones, I’ve taken up far too much of your time already. I’m very grateful indeed for you coming and listening to all this. I know how outlandish it is. But please don’t dismiss it here and now. Take a couple of days to think about it, and then I’ll call you again, if I may. Remember, all you have to commit to at this stage is a feasibility study. You’re not going to be putting your reputation on the line. And remember too, if you will, that my client can commit very large financial resources to this project, should they be needed.’

  And then I was back in the reception area, shaking hands and saying goodbye, almost without knowing how I got there. She turned and walked back to her office, and I couldn’t help watching her as she went. She did not look back.

  §

  17 June

  Last night I gave my talk to the local humanist society. My theme was that if we believed in God, we immediately created an excuse for tolerating injustice, natural disasters, pain and loss. Christians and other religionists argue that God does not create suffering but the world in which suffering occurs, and suffering allows us to rediscover our oneness with God.

  I argued that such an approach stood logic on its head. All disasters, all loss, all suffering, demonstrate that there cannot possibly be a God, for why would a deity who is omnipotent create a universe so prone to disaster and accident? Religious faith, I argued, was invented in order to pacify the grieving multitudes and ensure they did not ask the really difficult questions, which if answered, would tend to lead to progress.

  We were quite a big group that evening: seven or eight of us. Muhammad Bashir, a grizzled old Pakistani from down the road, is a regular attender. I think he wants to save me from myself. At any rate, he knows me well and likes me even though I am, by his lights, a blasphemer.

  ‘Dr Jones,’ he asked, ‘you are a fisherman, are you not?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘When I can.’

  ‘And how many hours do you fish before you catch something?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I replied, not clear what he was driving at. ‘Many hundreds of hours, sometimes.’

  ‘So why do you fish? Is that not a bad use of your time?’

  ‘Because I hope in the end I will catch one,’ I replied.

  The old man hissed with glee, rubbed his beard with his right hand and said, ‘Because you believe. Hope is belief. You have the beginnings of faith. Despite all the evidence, you want to believe. And when you catch one, what do you feel? A great happiness?’

  ‘A very great happiness,’ I said, smiling at him. It did him good to win the occasional argument with me, so I let him. I didn’t use the thousand logical and statistical arguments I could have done to put him down. I let him finish.

  ‘You see, Dr Jones, you believe, and in the end your belief brings you great happiness. You are rewarded for your constancy and your faith, and the reward is much greater than the possession of a fish, which you could buy for little money at Tesco. So you are, after all, not so very different to the rest of us.’

  §

  18 June

  This evening, after dinner, Mary looked up from the crossword and said to me, ‘I’m going away for a fortnight to work in our Geneva office.’

  This happened about once every year, so it wasn’t a total surprise. I raised my eyebrows to register mild disappointment and asked her when she was going.

  ‘On Sunday.’

  I reminded her that we had booked in weeks ago for a weekend’s walking and birdwatching with my brother in the Lake District.

  ‘I know,’ said Mary. ‘I’m awfully sorry. But someone in the Geneva office has gone on sick leave, and they need me to cover and I know the office. Perhaps you could come with me and we could walk in the hills by Lake Evian?’ But then she thought better of it and said that she would probably have to work Saturdays as well, to find her way into her the job. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you’ve got your weird fish project on, and you’d better stay with that to keep David Sugden happy.’

  I told her rather stiffly that I had not decided whether to do that yet.

  ‘You should,’ she said.

  The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night! A relatively rare event in our marriage of late.

  Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit,’ and turned on her side and seemed to go to sle
ep. For a moment I felt a bit like a dog that has just been given a biscuit, but then drowsiness swept across me and I started to doze.

  I fell into a waking dream, and saw the bright sunlight of the Yemen uplands and the glittering pools of water where hen salmon were laying their eggs amongst the gravel, 800 eggs per pound of body weight, and the cock salmon were injecting milt amongst them. The salmon eggs were fertilised. They hatched into little alevins. They wriggled about in the clear water and grew into fry, then parr. At each stage of their evolution the fish became larger and stronger, until they had smoked and were ready to make their journey to the sea. If we seeded a wadi in the Yemen with fish from an English river, would those fish head down to the sea in the summer rains, once they had grown? Would the smell of the saltwater lure them to the Indian Ocean, even if it was the wrong ocean? I rather thought so. And if we trapped them downstream and shipped them in purpose-built tanks back to the North Sea so that they could run to their feeding grounds in Iceland, what then? Would they overwinter there and then head back for their native English river, or would they try and find the Indian Ocean?

  We could radio tag them. Imagine the excitement if we tracked them heading down the African coast, searching for their new home.

  Suddenly I wanted this project. It was so strange that fundamental new science might be discovered. Our whole understanding of the nature of species migration might be transformed. We might witness, over time, the evolution of a new subspecies of salmon which could tolerate warm water, perhaps learn to feed itself in the rich soup of the Indian Ocean.

  Then Mary said loudly, ‘What?’

  ‘What do you mean, what?’

  ‘You were talking. In your sleep. About spawning. And egg production. Is that what you think about after we’ve made love? About your bloody fish and their reproductive cycles?’

  She switched on her bedside light and sat up. She was for some reason wide awake now and very upset. I’ve noticed that guilt makes people go on the attack. Perhaps that was what it was all about. At any rate, I didn’t want a row, about salmon reproductive cycles or anything else, so I said pacifically, ‘Darling, I wish we could do a bit of reproducing of our own.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied. ‘We both know that until either I am earning more than £100,000 a year or you are earning more than £70,000—which seems unlikely in view of your present relations with your department—then our after-tax income simply will not be sufficient to compensate for the additional cost of a child. Besides, I’m not ready to interrupt my career for three months, or even a month. Pregnancy might affect my chances of promotion, which right now I think are rather better than yours. You know all that. Why bring it up again?’

  Then she yawned. At least she had forgotten what had woken her up originally. She looked a little bewildered.

  I said, ‘I know, darling. You’re right. Switch out the light and let’s get some sleep.’

  But I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake thinking about our marriage, and wondering whether I was being unfair to Mary, or she to me. I asked myself whether things might have been different if we had had children. I thought about salmon spawning in the highlands of the Yemen. Round and round my head went these thoughts, chasing each other like salmon parr wriggling in the shimmering water of a stream.

  I got out of bed and came next door. I thought that maybe writing up my diary would help me sleep.

  It hasn’t.

  3

  Feasibility of introducing salmon into the Yemen

  Proposal submitted by Dr Alfred Jones of the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence (NCFE) to Fitzharris & Price, 28 June

  Executive summary

  NCFE has been invited to advise and comment to Fitzharris & Price on the feasibility of introducing migratory salmonids into the wadi systems of the Yemen. The longer-term objective is to develop opportunities for good-quality angling tourism in the country. The Arabian peninsula has a rich natural fishery offshore which is harvested by all of the Gulf States. Fishery exploitation and, increasingly, good fisheries management is well understood in the region.

  However, to date, angling for sport has not been accessible to most of the population. This could in theory change, if migratory fish such as salmon could be introduced into the river system. The proposal in this instance is to introduce salmon into the Wadi Aleyn in the western Yemen, as a pilot project. The longer-term objective is to develop a managed salmon fishery in this wadi, and subsequently in other watercourses where the right conditions can be found, or created.

  It is accepted that the Yemen is, in many respects, not the ideal environment into which to introduce migratory fish whose natural breeding habitat is the northern edge of the temperate zone and whose feeding grounds are in the North Atlantic. Some obvious problems include:

  Watercourses go from dry to spate conditions for relatively short periods of time and then only in the wet summer months in those parts of the Yemen which experience monsoon weather.

  Mean average air temperatures indicate that water temperatures are likely to be significantly higher than those tolerated by the species Salmo salar without developing stress.

  The migratory journey of the salmon, assuming the upper watercourse could be seeded with juvenile fish in the wet season, would be somewhat more challenging than its normal journey to the North Atlantic, being several thousand miles longer and involving a journey around the Cape of Good Hope and up the west coast of Africa before entering waters where salmon are normally found. The previous southern limit of the Atlantic salmon is the Bay of Biscay, and the southern limit of the northern Pacific salmon is northern California.

  Once the rains end in September conditions in the watercourses would become dry and hot and it is unlikely any salmon still resident in the system would survive.

  There are a number of other issues more technical in nature relating to the local ecosystem, lack of invertebrate life in the wadis (although there is an abundance of arthropods such as scorpions), bacterial issues, and the unknown question of predation. We speculate that buzzards, vultures and other local predators would quickly adapt to eating salmon stranded in relatively shallow water.

  We have considered various closed-system models and our current proposals, based on desktop research only, are as follows:

  Salmon from the North Sea would be trapped as they tried to enter their ‘home’ river and introduced into a cooled transport pod containing saline water from the North Sea. A condensation and recycling system would be installed to minimise evaporation losses. Means of controlling temperature and oxygen levels within the tank would also have to be found. The pod would be shipped by airfreight to the Yemen. The holding tank would be set up to have an outlet into the wadi which could be opened at need.

  As fresh rainwater came into the wadi system, the outlet would be opened allowing it to flow into the holding tank. Salmon are anadromous—they adapt to both salt- and freshwater environments. We speculate that the salmon, on smelling the freshwater, would leave the saline environment and seek to migrate upstream to find spawning grounds. Although the salmon would not recognise the ‘smell’ of the water (the mechanism by which salmon at sea identify the estuarine water of the river in which they were hatched is still poorly understood) we believe there is a reasonable chance they would enter the freshwater. ‘Strangers’ are often found in English and Scottish rivers—salmon which have entered another river different to the one where they were spawned.

  The upstream migration would depend on some civil engineering of the watercourse, subject to survey:

  a.) to ensure that gradients and natural obstacles did not obstruct the movement of the fish along at least 10 kilometres of riverbed, regarded as the minimum distance suitable for a meaningful pilot experiment

  b.) to ensure if possible some background level of flow from the aquifer to achieve a minimum level of water in the watercourse to avoid fish being stranded between spates

  We understand that in the Wadi
Aleyn there is an existing falaj system of stone conduits to allow the irrigation of a number of date palm groves which could be adapted for the purposes of the above.

  Salmon seek gravel beds covered in relatively thin layers of well-oxygenated water for spawning. We understand there is an abundance of gravel in the Yemen, and in the Wadi Aleyn in particular. It is at least theoretically possible that fish could be encouraged to spawn, as we would be introducing summer⁄autumn-run salmon into the watercourse and they would be seeking to spawn at the end of their upstream journey if the right habitat presented itself. This gives rise to the exciting possibility that the introduced salmon could spawn naturally, or at least be electrofished and harvested for their eggs, either of which would allow a hatchery to be set up adjacent to the Wadi Aleyn in which the next generation of juvenile salmon would have an excellent chance of survival. This would create a generation of salmon whose true home was the Wadi Aleyn. How their migratory instincts could subsequently be managed must be a matter for further research. We speculate that the creation of a second holding tank filled with saltwater could be used to trick salmon returning downriver into thinking they smelled seawater, and trap and hold them in a saltwater environment.

  At this stage we have not attempted to cost this project until the client has had a chance to consider and comment on the outline concept we have presented. We estimate that, excluding NCFE time and project management charges, the capital costs of this project would be in the region of £5 million. We have not yet considered operating costs. We await the client’s further instructions.

  Letter

  Fitzharris & Price

  Land Agents & Consultants

  St James’s Street

  London

  Dr Alfred Jones

  National Centre for Fisheries Excellence

  Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

  Smith Square