A Change of Scenery
April 6, 2009
After losing our phones and Internet in the office again Castle Cement have found us alternative accommodation. We’re now sitting proud at the top of the main building (lots of stair climbing!). We moved in on Wednesday and are here until works to our office phone lines are completed. It is hope this will be shortly but if it’s not at least we can now work effectively.
Monday I met with Catherine Higham of Webfettlers who do our website, and we discussed the way forward for our website. Several updates due any time now, as well as some new pages in the not to distant future. Our normal brief with the Chairman and a discussion on our consultation to the much talked about Water framework Directive, River Basin Management Plan or WFD RBMP for short (well sort of). I spent the afternoon finalising our proposal for the American Signal Crayfish and also refreshing myself with the legalities of crayfish (http://www.thefishsite.com/articles/403/nonnative-crayfish-in-the-uk for those interested).
We managed a short visit to Mearly Brook, an inspection of Primrose lodge seems to indicate that a sluice has been opened, and a volume of silt has been released into the beck. This was confirmed by a resident on the Brook. We hope this won’t have damaged to beck to much, and an invert sample by John Barret seemed to show a significant improvement from the previous month, but he also noted a strange colour to the beck. The silt is less damaging to the sampled inverts than to fish or their redds.
We had a call Tuesday saying there maybe some money for WFD projects to be spent by March so a hasty sit down results in a nice long list of work that we submitted, fingers crossed it just might come off! I also did some kick sampling on a Brook targeted for restoration stocking with Brown Trout Fry. The results were mixed and further analysis is required.
Wednesday we made our office move and then the next two days I immersed myself, and nearly drowned, in the WFD RBMP consultation.
Friday was relatively quiet, the Chairman and our new trustee David Wilmot came into have a planning session on how we can promote the trust, and try and increase our membership. We’ve come up with some really good ideas, and I hope that we’ll manage to raise the membership of the trust.
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