The Ones That Get Away

I had heard from a friend with whom I am working on a book project on the River Teign catchment area that the Salmon and Seatrout would be beginning to run after the water levels dropped at the end of the week following all the recent heavy rainfall. The nearest spot to where I live where this annual phenomenon of nature can be seen regularly is at the Castle Drogo Weir on the River Teign just below Castle Drogo, on northeast Dartmoor in Devon, UK.

I have seen salmon running once before, when we lived in San Francisco in California for a couple of years in the 1980’s, courtesy of BP. Through the Danish side of my family I had a cousin of similar age who lived close by to Lake Tahoe, and my wife and I would regularly visit her and her husband for weekends at their home on the Truckee River in South Tahoe. The landscape was quite beautiful, especially in autumn, and the wildlife plentiful – including the beavers who built a damn across the Truckee River at the edge of their land.

One weekend when we were visiting, they said we should go and see the Kokanee Salmon running at Taylor Creek. Both my wife and I were expecting a dull hour or two standing by a cold river, waiting for a lone salmon to pass by – if we were lucky. However, the sight we saw was straight out of a TV wildlife documentary – the river was frothing red with hundreds of bright red Kokanee Salmon making their way upriver to spawn. If one had a basic child’s fishing net one could have scooped up enough salmon to fill a deep freeze unit within 2 minutes – the Salmon were everywhere, following their instinct to swim upriver to find a mate and spawn. The Forestry Service had even built an underground observation chamber with a large glass window to watch proceedings from beneath the water surface. All quite awe inspiring.

The experience at the Castle Drogo Weir was perhaps less spectacular with a lot fewer fish than at Taylor Creek, but equally spectacular. The weir was built originally to create a head of water (now known as Drew’s Pool) to supply a small hydro-electric generator plant about 500 yards downstream. The electricity generated was supplied by cable to Castle Drogo, and after falling into disrepair the generator plant has recently been restored. In order to allow fish to continue to migrate upriver for spawning, notably Salmon and Seatrout, a series of small pools or ‘Salmon Leaps’ were constructed below the weir, forming what is sometimes known as a ‘Salmon Ladder’.

So I waited for 2 or 3 days of reduced rainfall, and on a Saturday afternoon I wandered up to the weir. I have never photographed this before so it was a steep learning curve for me. Sure enough the river was hardly frothing with an abundance of salmon, but there were a couple of people sitting there by the side of the river intently watching for action, of which they assured me there was some – if I was patient. So I set my camera up and waited…

Quite tricky – low light against the bright white foam of the water; not easy to predict where exactly the fish will leap, or when, and when they do one has about a second, maybe two to catch it, so I focussed on the general area with a much wider field of view rather than one would use for a single static image.

I decided to use a high ISO of ISO-2,500 to ISO-16,000 to enable a high shutter speed of 1/1,600s to 1/2,500s for an aperture of about f8 – fast film speed because of the low light and wanting to freeze the motion with a high shutter speed, plus a reasonably wide aperture to create a reasonable depth of field to stand a chance of getting a fish in focus. And then the wait for a fish to leap…

It isn’t easy. One can wait 5 minutes or half an hour… the fish are not in abundance, (and certainly not in the quantities that I observed at Taylor Creek!) there is no warning – just a flash of black in the corner of your eye and then that is it, it’s over. Certainly not enough time to freely handle your camera, as by the time you realise that dark shadow is a fish, it is re-entering the water. Instead I found it best to position my camera on a tripod with a relatively long lens, focused on the area of water that seemed to have the most fish activity… but staying alert with one’s finger on the camera shutter button whilst continuously watching the same patch of moving water and remaining focused is easier said than done!

Over the space of about 2 1/2 hours I saw about 10 fish leaping (or maybe the same 2 or 3 leaping several times each…). Maybe nothing for 30 minutes, then 2 fish in 5 minutes… Not risking averting one’s gaze – a glance at one’s wristwatch and you miss it. Then a leap – maybe catch 2 images or 3 images if you are really lucky… They are in the air for less than 2 seconds, so by the time you realise that it is a Salmon or Seatrout and you fire the camera, it is already back in the water!

For a first attempt, I was quite pleased with my photos. I thought at first that they were quite grainy due to the excessive film speed, and the amount of cropping required of the image (even with a ‘long’ lens) to see the fish in any detail, but then I realised that in actual fact a lot of the apparent grain is not grain at all, but actually spray from the Salmon Leaps. In all I spent about 7 hours sitting on several lumps of cold wet granite to catch these images – what did you do on your Saturday afternoon?