Salmon Net Gallery

For me, this project started with a chance invite to join a Northumberland fisherman for a day drift net fishing for salmon in the North Sea. It has grown to the point where I have now photographed nearly all types of netting undertaken for salmon and sea trout in England, Scotland and Wales in recent years, and even visited Ireland to record something of the Irish drift net fishermen before they were bought out after the 2006 season. Salmon net fishing today ranges from viable commercial operations, which can catch as many as 100 salmon in a day, to men maintaining inefficient methods for purely preservation purposes who catch a handful of fish at most each season.

Over the centuries, a wide variety of methods developed for catching salmon. For many years these local variations were preserved by laws that largely allowed existing fishing rights to continue, but prevented any new or modified fishing practices. Only today are they under threat from pressures to conserve stocks.

In Scotland, commercial netting is now a pale shadow of its former self, some netsmen forced out by dwindling stocks and more having been bought out to conserve maximum stocks for the angling fraternity. The tradition is known to go back more than 800 years, and was much more intensive in the past, so it is unreasonable to lay the blame for the relatively recent decline in salmon numbers solely at the netsmens’ door.