What a lovely morning it is! The forecast seems to be indicating a week of “settled” weather. I hope this is the beginning of spring proper! Last week was another busy week, with plenty of meetings, site visits and the usual office work. I had friends visiting on the weekend who although none were anglers are reading my blog regularly! This is a nice feeling as I hope that the blog is giving the wider public the information on how what we do is for the benefit of the entire catchment as well as the main river users. They also pointed out how poor my grammar is, so I apologise for this, and so I will strive to improve this!

Our normal Monday morning brief with our chairman went well, and a huge “to-do” list was drawn up. This was further added to when our newest Trustee (Dave Wilmot) popped in for a meeting about how we can boost our support and members. We have several projects on the go, details of which will be available in May (following the next Trustee’s meeting). Our website continues to be at the centre of this and we are working with our developers to make it more informative, and interactive. We are also trying to build an email list of all of our members, I have about 1/3 of the email addresses so far. Many will not have email, but for those that do it is an easy and quick way of communicating with them, and may help save RCCT money in the long term. So if you are a member and would like to be included on the list please drop me an email to let me know (jack@ribbletrust.com). All members of Ribblesdale anglers are members of RCCT and I have a copy of their email addresses, so if you are in Ribblesdale don’t worry about sending me your contact details.

Tuesday we undertook a site visit to the Stock beck visit with Philip Lord (our Chairman) to inspect works to date, and look at further works. In the afternoon we worked on our various project proposals and correspondence. Not the most exciting work, but very necessary.

Wednesday was a really good day, we met David Fisher from the North Lancashire Bat group. We looked at the scope of putting up some bat boxes within one of our habitat schemes. The land owner is all in favour and hopefully a dozen or so boxes will go up this year. This is a great scheme to help promote the overall work that we do, and also trial the success for inclusion in future schemes. All 17 species of Bat in the UK are Biodiversity action plan (BAP) species and this will help us to promote our habitat schemes. I spent the afternoon finalising our response to the EA sheep dip pollution reduction plans. This will be sent in to the EA in the near future.

Thursday I created a small flier for the public, outlining what the trust does and how people can get involved to help the scheme. It is different from our newsletters, and we hope that you will all see one in the near future! After lunch we went and surveyed one of our fish easements on Hellifield beck, and checked the water quality up stream. We picked up a minor pollution issue, but the invertebrates indicate that if we get our easements in there is fantastic scope for fish to spawn.

Friday we went out with our main contractor to inspect some habitat scheme repairs and to price up the Hellifield fish easement. He was very positive and gave the impression he wanted to get in and do it then and there! It is so good to work with keen contractors, who are interested in improving the environment not just getting more work. Prior to this we had looked at a similar fish easement in the catchment, we turned some stone above the easement and found this monster lurking under a rock:

No Comments Yet.

Got something to say?

Name (required)

Email Address (required)

Website

Speak your mind