Saturday 14th August:  Spent the morning preparing information slides for the public meeting on Monday night. While the main purpose is to discuss Spring Salmon policy, I have to be prepared for any and all possible questions and queries. The usual topics (the "miracles" produced by stocking on the Tyne and the Ranga for example) are bound to come up, but I have to try and anticipate all eventualities. It's in doing this sort of thing that the gap between what many anglers think stocking can do and the reality of what it actually achieves becomes very obvious and there is a real issue here in how so many anglers get so badly misinformed. It's not that the true facts and figures aren't available, it's just that they never seem to get into the angling press, which is where most anglers get their information from. In the afternoon, down to the nets at Paxton for more tagging, to be greeted by the news that the netsmen hadn't bothered to net the last few days as tides have been so high, the result of constant North winds piling the water up against the coast. So, no great hopes, but got four salmon acoustic tagged and another four Sea-trout floy tagged. One of the acoustic tagged Sea-trout netted here during the previous session went back downstream afterwards and turned up the Whiteadder, so the netting station here does take Whiteadder fish. The best "crowd" so far this season, about 30 people in all turning up to watch.

Monday 16th August: More preparations for tonight's meeting in the morning, then spent the afternoon reading some problem scales with my counterpart on the Dee who's come down for the meeting tonight to be on the panel and give an account of what's been done on the Dee and how things have worked out there. In the evening to Kelso for the public meeting on Spring Salmon policy. A much smaller turn-out than we had anticipated but the questions were pretty much along the lines that I had expected so I had the appropriate information ready.

Tuesday 17th August: Out with Kenny to do electric-fishing sites on burns on the Till. When the Foundation started electric-fishing back in the 1990's, we did it in two formats: quantitative sites on the larger channels for salmon which were to be repeated every few years, and timed sites on the smaller burns, for trout, to see what was where and generate a baseline, which were "one-offs", there being no resources to repeat these regularly. However, with the start of the TTGI and the arrival of Kenny, we have started to repeat these trout sites as well, years after they were first done. At one site today,  a young man at the farm remembered my previous visit when as a 10 year old, seventeen years ago in 1993, he'd held the bucket for me ! Not only were there more trout that we'd found 17 years ago, Lamprey were still there and there were some Salmon parr - and even some salmon fry - which we hadn't found in 1993. We also repeated the Fry Index sites on the Hetton Burn, a flat, silty, lowland, stream which had more salmon than we've ever found there before, even at the topmost site. However, the Flodden Burn was appropriately disastrous - not in terms of trout fry numbers, which were better than 17 years before - but because we found Signal Crayfish in significant numbers, including many at only around 1cm in length, signs of recent  and successful breeding. Some of the crayfish were in burrows that they had dug, the first time I've seen these, and this is the great worry of course - the banks of the Till and its streams are soft enough as it is, but what strength will they have when riddled with crayfish burrows ? On another burn, we found no trout at all at the site, only a couple of Eels - when this happens, the usual suspect is some new obstacle or other, so Kenny walked down it to the main channel to check, but found nothing. Suspicion then fell on a septic tank for a large hotel complex that was beside the burn, upstream of the electric-fishing site, and sure enough, when we electric-fished upstream of that, we found abundant trout. I doubt this tank discharges into the burn, which is too small for that, but there may be a leak - our findings will be going to the EA for them to follow up.

Wednesday 18th August:  Some main channel netting today, for a change. Water levels have been too high for this the last couple of summers, but were just right today and it went well - too well, in fact, as in the first shot, covering 50-60m of the Teviot near Nisbet, we got over 1,300 Grayling fry which we were just not set up to cope with in terms of tubs, measuring boards etc. We just had to measure and sample and then count the rest. Also one Brown-trout of 55cms and 39 takeable trout of 8-10" which given the low efficiency of the method is probably only half of what was actually there, at best. While looking at this mass of Grayling fry, Kenny informed me that there was a comment on one of the angling forums he looks at that there were "no Grayling fry in the Teviot", which just shows the nonsense you can find on the Web. The second site was shorter and shallow and this time we only got 300+ Grayling fry, a Sea-trout and half a dozen takeable trout. More salmon parr here as well, most 130-140mm, but also a giant of 180mm, the biggest I think I have ever seen. Why a parr should grow 60mm larger than the average size of smolt on the Tweed (120mm) seems strange.

Thursday 19th August: Out with Kenny to electric-fish the Lilburn. We have a habitat test site here, now some 12 years old and the deeper bits in this fenced area are now over 1m in depth, with masses of cover from undercut banks and tree roots. Masses of 5-7" trout as well, and some takeable too. In the unfenced area, much less in the way of depth, cover and trout parr, though masses of Fry. The ordinary survey work took us right to the headwaters of the Lilburn, where we got three takeable trout in one deepish glide and - rather to my surprise - found that the second uppermost size was dominated by salmon fry, yet a long way from the Till and much higher than it.

Friday 20th August: Weekly meeting, then writing up the week's fieldwork.