Back into the groove and fishing well
June 29, 2009
The second week of electro fishing surveys has been unbelievable with 21 surveys completed in the week! The Calder has had some mixed results, but what they mean will really depend on my “calibrating surveys” still yet to be done. Although October seems a long way away, the rate at which we have to survey means it will come round incredibly quickly! It also means keeping in contact with everyone becomes very difficult, an example is that Philip came in first thing Monday for what was the first weekly brief I had had with him in what felt like a long long time!
We were discussing specifically additional points that we wanted to put into the draft River basin Management Plan (dRBMP) which we had to submit that day! After carefully looking at action points of note I penned an email and whizzed it through before the deadline of the consultation! After this we had a brief chat and then Brad and I headed out to get some surveys done.
Tuesday I asked Brad (my electro fishing assitant) to come in a little later as I had to get some office work done and always feel guilty if he hasn’t got much to do. So I got my emails sent and the latest Riverfly partnership survey sites sent to the volunteers (first results now in – Thanks guys!). Then it was down to pick up Brad and head out. Our last survey site of the day put a real downer on what had been a top afternoon. As we dicovered a serious sewage pollution which we reported through to the hotline (0800 80 70 60 – please if you see pollution of any kind or severity get it rung in!), and I will let you know when I can about the results.
Wednesday Brad went off to Lancaster to get his degree results and so I spent the morning sorting the Catch and Release Badge final details and chasing a few bits and pieces, in the afternoon Stephen and I went out and did a survey, it was meant to be several but after and incident involving a style and equipment cable we had to head back to the office for “running repairs”.
Thursday I had been lined up to talk to Radio Lancs about Volunteering, what we do and how people can get involved, so hopefully some of you heard this and decide to get involved! We also managed to get another 5 surveys in – whilst being devoured by midges!!
Friday was a late start, but we got 3 surveys done again the midges were at us but I just keep telling myself lots of midges lots of salmonid food! The first two were on my personal favourite tributary of the Calder and for that matter the whole of the Ribble. We had a fantastic fry result, and were shocked beyond belief when in a small pool of this really small beck we turned out a 1lb brownie followed by a 2lb brownie and missed an even bigger one. These were wild fish!! I can’t reveal their location for their own protection, but needless to say it was a nice result. We also had a meeting on site at our fish rescue job, and finalised the last details. This means that we will get some nice income to help other work!
I hope the Blogs don’t get to samey now that the electro fishing has started – let me know if they do!! I will try and make sure that I just don’t list how many surveys done on each day!
And so the surveys begin!
June 22, 2009
Well Monday was a busy day of trying to get myself organised for our first electro fishing surveys. Bradley George is our summer placement helping me with Surveys. Brad also helped last year and for some reason (must be a gluten for punishment) has come back this year. Although I have Brads help I still need people to come along and do electro fishing with us. So if you are able to help with this please drop me an email or phone call. It is a great way to see just how many fish there are in even the smallest of becks!
Monday we got our kit together and headed for Habergham to survey a proposed introduction site for trout fry. Essentially we wanted to check that there were no trout in this site. We had found none last year in this beck and it was assumed to be the result of historical mine water pollution. So we were going to a different tributary of this sub-catchment to get some fry to transfer. However when we got to site on the first pass of the first survey we got trout!! A good omen, and also meant we didn’t need to do a fry transfer. We also went on site to meet some Building contractors who are working on the Calder who require a fish rescue. We had a positive meeting and in three weeks we will undertake the work. The brilliant thing is that the money raised from this will be reinvested into the catchment.
Tuesday I spent the day in St Michaels and st Johns Primary school with Helen Nightingale of the EA, and two of her team (Jason and Carl). The day was spent educating the different age groups of kids about types of pollution, their effects, what to do in the event of a pollution incident, and how not to pollute in the first place. After the talk on this I took the kids down and did a kick sample on Mearly Brook with them – Which they absolutely loved!! No one including the teachers could believe how much life there was in there. We hope to run more of these days to help educate people from a young age about the importance of clean water.
Wednesday we went out and managed 3 surveys before the pouring rain got the better of us! Soaked through we limped back to the office and spent the afternoon doing paperwork! So far we have seen some positive results and I am encouraged that the suitable low flows and lack of floods has given the trout redds and fry a greater chance of survival.
I’m not sure if anyone has seen Live Ribble Valley this month, but we featured in an article called Matching the Hatch, where we discussed the types and size of inverts and how many flies were needed in your box! This article was seen by a producer of Radio Lancashire who invited us in for an interview on Thursday with Ted Robbins. This went really well and I know that at least one person heard it (thanks mum!). In the afternoon we got out for one quick survey before going to Lutra house to meet With Richard and Rebecca to discuss monitoring potential salmonid populations changes that may occur as a result of Settle Hydro Scheme.
Friday we completed a Quantitive survey, which we rushed back from to meet with Dai “the Duff” Roberts – our Riverfly partnership tutor. We helped set up and then left him with Stephen to check our workshop site actually had inverts in it! I then Nipped down to Bushburn to meet Mel Dyack and some of his volunteers:
We spent a good hour and a half pulling Himalayan Balsam, it went really well and we cleared a large area. Many Thanks to Mel and his team!
Saturday was the Riverfly Workshop day, which went off without a hitch, and I got the impression that everyone really enjoyed themselves. And we were really pleased because at the end of th day we had another 11 water quality monitors trained and itching to go out and survey! Thank you to all who attended, and anyone who is interested please drop me an email as I am almost ready to book the next course!
Final week’s preperation
June 16, 2009
Last week was an important week to try and square off all those little loose ends that needed sorting before the major push of the electro fishing season. Which was “interupted” by a fishing and invertebrate workshop/competition in Wester Ross!
Monday I had to lias with the EA on exact location of Electro fishing sites to secure my consents to proceed and also to make sure that we weren’t surveying anywhere that might put protected species at risk. I also purchased the hand held device and software for doing the recording in the field. I also had a chat with Richard McIlwain the EA Fisheries Team Leader for our area. I had heard rumours of him changing role and alas it is true. He is leaving the position all be it on a temporary basis to cover for another change of job. Richard has done a fantastic job in our region and we will be very sad to see him go. His replacement (Jackie Swire) has been chosen and so we have agreed that before Richard leaves, during a hand over period, that we will sit down for a brew to chat to Jackie with Richard and myself and Stephen, to try and continue the strong links that we have forged with the fisheries team.
Tuesday we had a meeting with Philip and Dave Wilmot to discuss how we will take forward membership bosoting, fund raising and some other schemes. I am pleased to announce something that we have been working on for many week: We will be running a Catch and Release Badge Scheme for Salmon Starting from the 17th of June 2009. An application form will be made available to download, which if you C&R a salmon you can fill in and send in with £2, and then at the end of the season we will send out the badges. These will be small Lapel badges and I will put a page dedicated to this onto the website very soon. We will also now be providing a membership pack for those who join the trust, we have no start date for this but all exisiting members will receive their’s with next years subs. And finally we also will hopefully have a wild trout passport scheme in place for next season. We have secured some nice small becks for fishing, and we now need to secure funding to set up the website. More details to follow shortly. These are projects we have been working on for months alongside everything else and it is nice to be able to finally announce them!!
Wednesday I went over to Pendle water with college students from Burnley college to undertake training in invertebrate sampling and walk over habitat surveys. This was an excellent day and we as the trust have come away with some extra benefits in that we hope to use the students next year to help in maping habitat and invasive species accross our whole catchment.
Thursday was the Wester Ross Trust’s workshop, but I have run out of time this morning!! So I will do a post for this before the end of the week. Needless to say it was the most fantastic weekend!!
A good limp but not stopping me from getting around!!
June 8, 2009
Well the short week was quite welcome as a slightly (- under statement!) sore knee had me limping most of last week. I decided that perhaps this was a good excuse to finally get my desk clear of paperwork. Well I got loads done and my to do list shrank but some how I have more paper all over my desk! Perhaps I should learn to file things properly, but where the fun in that! Plus a messy desk is a proof of work load!
Tuesday was a good day, first thing we headed down to the Highways dept for Ribble Valley to discuss making Road Culverts passable for fish, we I have identified 3 that are defiantely impassable and will be having a negative impact on fish migration and populations. The guys down there were brilliant, really keen to work with us, providing us with valuable information and we have decided now that we need to pick one site and run a trial to see if we can make them passable, but also design them such that the pass is not an issue for culvert maintenance etc.
In the afternoon I cleared my back log of emails, and sent out a few emails to form links with many of the people I had met on the previous week at Durham. It is so important to have these courses to allow ideas to be exchanged on all manner of topics not just the training course! I did however get some bad news on grant funding front, we failed in a bid to get money for our River Don Fish pass, however we have some indication from a new party that there would be money available so we threw an application together and got that over to them (so cross you fingers!).
Wednesday was the day that I finally sat down and sorted my electro fishing schedule for this year. 316 sites, June 15th to October 4th is the plan. This works out at 20 a week (but I am hoping for a week off at some point) plus if it rains and we get a spate… not to mention other duties. Our priority is to get round all of last years sites then to worry about additional sites.
On Thursday morning I met a photographer (Charlotte of lottie designs – www.lottiedesigns.com) who took some pictures of me kick sampling for the Live Ribble Valley magazine article. In a surprise we actually had a reallly good kick sample with only the True Mayfly abscent! Charlotte was absolutely amazed by the amount of invertebrate life in the river, as was another passer by!
Later on I purchased some equipment to help with the speed of our surveys (electro fishing, invert and habitat) – it is a pda with gps and Arcpad (arc pacd is a Geographical information System or GIS that allows modelling databasing and navigation). I have built and electronic form that will allow our data to be entered directly and then uploaded to my PC in the correct format and already analysed. Last year data inputting and analysis took me 18 days - then I had to interpret the data! This will now save me 18 days that I can spend on other things, as well as make sure that I don’t forget to record anything.
Friday Philip came in for a brief chat, byt typically having not seen him for several weeks it turned into a longer meeting than planned and I got away late for my next meeting. This was with Stephanie Peyaer and Nathan Edmonds (of CEFAS), to discuss a research project for salmonid predation by signal crayfish. We walked over our site getting a good feel for the subcatchment and getting a good chance to discuss the impact, and a quick stone turn had Nathan gob smacked by the number of signals (and how small they were). This is a common misconception – our crayfish are so small that they are not worth eating if you tried to have a meal from them you would struggle and spend a long time shelling! This is because our upland becks are not as productive as the lowland rivers where the crayfish get bigger. Overall the meeting went well and we will hopefully be going ahead with the research next year (and maybe some funding!!).
The knee is now nearly back to normal but is still giving me some jipp. Another week of going easy should do it…. I hope it does it as the electro fishing is going to be pretty intensive! Oh and sorry salmon anglers I’m praying for good weather this summer – real good weather not good fishing weather, as electro fishing in the rain is not fun if not impossible!
If you are interested in volunteering to do some electro fishing (I will be doing some Saturdays) please give me a shout jack@ribbletrust.com it’s really good fun and a real eye opener!
A valuable trip to Durham….
June 3, 2009
Well I couldn’t get my head round the lengthof last week, just 3 days! The Bank Holiday afforded some much needed time off with fishing (see last weeks blog). Then I took Friday off to prepare for my Oxfam Trail Trekker on Saturday. “A day to prepare for a walk??!!” I hear you say, but this is no ordinary walk! The Blistering hear (literally) and 100km (or 62.5 miles in old money) is nothing to be scoffed at! It Started at Skipton, then the route took us through Gargrave, Malham, up Pen-y-Ghent, Horton on Ribblesdale, Bacup, Coniston, over the moors and back to Skipton! We completed the course in 22 hours and 21 mins. This included 5 x 15min stops for water and food but nothing more! Our time brought us in a very respectable 8th out of 166!! Funny how the competitive spirit kicks in once you realise you’re in the top 20! The day was fantastic, but the walk through the night was hell on earth and we have all vowed never again (but we did say that in 2007 when we did the same distance in 24 hours across the south downs!).
So that only left me 3 days in the “office” last week. Monday was unfortunately just that, chasing money, filling in consents, organising training, corresponding with various organisations and generally pushing paper! Unfortunately these days are required from time to time, so I try to get my head down and plough through it! Although thanks to Stephen who when I’m drowning amongst the thousands of sheets of paper pulls me out and gets me on a site visit!
Wednesday and Thursday were spent in Durham, at the University attending a training course organised by the Association of Rivers Trusts. The training equipped all those who attended withthe necessary skills to use a computer model (Called SCIMAP) to map out areas within each of our respective catchment with high erosion risk and diffuse pollution. “Woah” - what does that mean? Essentially we now have a tool that will allow us to identify areas that are likely to be causing high amounts of sediment and nutrient pollution. This means that we can now use this tool to focus our efforts in the right areas. It will cut out a huge amount of time spent on the ground trying to identify where we should work. That said once the map of areas to target is drawn up we still need to get out there and use our eyes on the ground to check if the model was right! And when we combine this withour fisheries surveys and invertebrate results we will have some data that will make our work very very effective. Many thanks to the University of Durham, and imparticularly – Stuart, Dave and Sim.
The only trouble with having been out of the office for 5 working days is that upon my return I had 52 emails – all requiring action…. so on that note I’d best get back to trawling through them!!
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