Ian Thorburn steered the old ship's lifeboat out into the loch, to where the tops of the fish pens jutted out in the shadows of the snow-dusted hills. Stepping on to a narrow wooden platform around one cage, he peered down through the cold, clear water and watched a 25lb salmon roll majestically as it snapped at a pellet of food.
The silver of its sides glinted briefly before it disappeared among a thousand other salmon filling the 15ft deep cage. It was easy to understand why so many anglers ascribe almost mystical qualities to this, the most aristocratic of fish.
Thorburn is the production director of a thriving salmon farm in Loch Carron on Scotland's remote west coast and might be expected to regard the fish merely as a crop to be harvested. Not so: "You do have to admit that it's a hell of a sight, a superb fish," he says.
The salmon has been as synonymous with Scotland as heather and haggis. The popular public image is of powerful salmon in their thousands leaping and twisting up swollen rivers in the annual spring run. But if you eat Scottish salmon in a restaurant these days the chances are it will have been grown from eggs on a farm rather than caught in the wild. And farm salmon will probably be cheaper than cod this year.
John Minaur is the chairman of the Scottish Salmon Growers Association as well as managing director of Highland Fish Farmers based at Loch Carron. In 1974, it was one of only five companies launching tentatively into salmon farming and now, he says, there are more than 80, employing more than 1,000 people full-time. But next year the industry will produce 25,000 tonnes of fish valued at ú100 million at the "farm gate". By the end of the century production will almost double and there will be another thousand jobs.
The big leap forward for the industry came with the development of new techniques for the growing of salmon smolts, young fish, from eggs in large cages in fresh water lochs, instead of the old, labour-intensive and costly methods of using tanks on land before the fish were transferred to sea water cages. It opened the way to mass, year-round production.
A trial television campaign is about to start in the South of England, possibly followed by a national, ú1.5 million campaign; and a promotion team will visit all the country's 3,000 fishmongers, encouraging them to stock salmon, handing out stickers and running competitions with prizes of holidays in the Highlands.
But what will the winners find there? The traditional image is of the lone angler, thigh deep in the cool water of a Highland river, trying to outwit the cunning salmon into taking his fly. But the majority of wild salmon have always been caught by netting, mainly at coastal stations sited on the migratory routes of the returning fish.
It is the men who work these coastal stations, often sleeping in rough shacks in sand dunes between February and September, who are most at risk from the factory salmon industry. By lowering the price, the farm salmon could put them out of business - at a time when they are already threatened by the owners of the inland salmon beats, who are clubbing together to buy them out.
There are anglers who will willingly pay up to ú2,000 a week to fish a prime salmon river, and the Scottish tourist industry's annual take from fishermen who visit the country each year is put as high as ú200 million. A wild salmon, in fact, is now worth more to the Scottish economy when taken by rod and line than by net.
One report, by the Scottish branch of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, valued rod-and-line salmon at ú3,500 per fish, because of the knock-on effect in hotels, restaurants, car hire and other aspects of the tourist industry.
Catches however have been steadily falling, and the numbers of wild salmon successfully completing their annual journey from the Atlantic feeding grounds to spawn in their home rivers have never been lower. In 1985 the total wild salmon haul plummetted to below 1,000 tonnes for the first time and the total catch is valued at ú5 million. For this it is said, the netsmen are to blame.
Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Campbell, a former Royal Marines officer, is the riparian owner of two and a quarter miles of the Dee opposite his home at Altries House, Maryculter, near Aberdeen. He describes the decline in stocks as alarming; his leather-bound record book reveals that it would now take a good month to catch what 20 years ago was an average day's haul of salmon from the beats he owns.
"Everyone can sympathize with those who depend on the netting of salmon for their jobs, even if it is only part-time for most of them," he says. "Similarly everyone sympathizes with all those in work, whose jobs or industry have been made redundant by modern technology.
"But few people realize what a threat there is to the stock of wild salmon caused by the overkill by netting on the sea and around our coasts. The salmon have to get back to the river to breed and, unless they do so, no one will have salmon in the future," he says.
So alarmed were he and other keen anglers at the decline in salmon stock in traditionally abundant rivers that a new organization, the Atlantic Salmon Conservation Trust, has been set up with the intention of buying out hundreds of interceptory netting operations around the coast, with a view to encouraging better management of fish stocks. It will cost, they estimate, ú5 million on top of the ú750,000 they have already spent to buy in 283 nets mostly on the north-east coast, affecting rivers such as the Findhorn, the Spey, the Don and the Royal Dee.
It is on the Dee, where members of the Royal family regularly fish, that the Trust's most spectacular success has come. In three weeks the 75 owners of fishing rights on the river, together with local businesses and anglers, donated ú370,000 to the Trust so that it could buy out the two netting operations on the nearby coast.
Lt-Col Campbell, who organized the buy-out, says that since the nets were taken off inquiries to rent fishing have increased by 70 per cent.
Sir William Gordon-Cumming, who runs his family's 12,000-acre estate near Forres, started the Trust with his friend Patrick Wills, of the tobacco family. He claims that coastal netting is indiscriminate because it catches fish without knowing which river they are heading for and therefore without consideration of the state of salmon stocks. It is also economically unviable, he says, because most of the food demand for salmon is now met by the cheaper, farm-grown variety.
These views are not new. An inquiry in 1960 blamed the coastal netting operations and called for action to limit their activities. The measures the Trust has adopted were first called for in the Hunter Report of 20 years ago, left on the shelf of government after government.
Sir William estimates that the nets already acquired, when closed, will release an extra 40,000 salmon a year into the rivers, about 35 per cent of the current catch taken by the net.
"I suppose somebody always benefits when something like this is done but that is not the reason for it," he says. "Without action the future of the salmon in our rivers will be very bleak indeed, and to be honest I prefer the salmon to some of the people I know who owns the rivers."
The Trust buys the rights to netting from proprietors, companies or individuals, and is waiting to open detailed negotiations with the biggest owner of them all, the Crown Estates.
Not surprisingly, the buy-outs have left the net fishermen angry and embittered. One of the men affected by the operations of the Trust is Leslie Woodward who, for the past five years, has run a netting station on the Moray Firth. It has now been acquired by the Trust and will close next year. For him this means the end of a chosen way of life.
He pays ú5,000 a year to fish the Shillahead station on the southern shores of the Firth in the Culbin Forests. He employs up to five men at ú110 a week; they can turn over ú45,000 a year and in a good week lift 1,500 salmon from the sea. On a bad day however, they can work 20 hours, catch nothing and lose ú3,000-worth of nets and gear.
Woodward rejects the Trust's figures and is suspicious of their motives. "I think they are talking nonsense. I don't see the evidence to back up their claims that it is all the fault of the netsmen. If they succeed in closing us down hundreds of men will be out of work and too many fish would be allowed back into the rivers, increasing the risk of disease."
Netsmen like Woodward claim they are being made the scapegoats for declining stock when the real problem is overfishing in the salmon feeding grounds of the Faroes and Greenland, and large-scale drift net operations which catch fish bound for Scottish rivers off the Northumberland coast, a practice outlawed in Scotland. They also blame uncontrolled numbers of seals around the Scottish coast for killing more than the annual total catch of salmon. The Trust, they argue, will rob working men of their livelihoods while lining the pockets of already wealthy river owners, who can increase their charges to anglers.
The Salmon Net Fishing Association, which disputes the accuracy of salmon-stock figures compiled by the Trust, says that up to 2,000 men who depend on the industry could lose their jobs if the Trust succeeds.
But the Trust claims growing public support, and has now launched an appeal to raise the money it needs to buy out the coastal nets. There will be resistance, especially from the bigger netting companies, and it may well be the success of the cheaper farm salmon that finally sees off the coastal operation.
The salmon in the net is worth only what the netsman can get for it; and as the quality and availability of farm salmon improves the gap between its price and the premium that can be demanded for wild salmon narrows.
Even salmon farming, however, faces a dilemma in its drive to increase the home market (much of the crop now goes for export, where the Norwegians dominate the trade): how can it maintain the salmon's images as the king of fish while convincing people that it is cheap enough for the ordinary dinner table?
