Monday 4th December : At work at 07.00 getting the catch records analyses and the presentation for the Tweed Commission (as it has just been renamed) ready. Late getting down to Kelso for the meeting - an historic one as this is the first after the new Tweed Order. What was the Tweed Council is now the Tweed Commission and the Chairman is now the Chief Commissioner so there's new terminology to get used to.  A lot of business today, the budget draft and the assessment rate for the forthcoming year for starters. The Biologists presentations are on catch records and the small fish caught this year (by me) and on the Signal Crayfish on the Till and the new Gala Water counter by James. There's also a presentation by the consultants of the results of the new economic survey of the Tweed's fishings which has been much more detailed and focussed than the national survey funded by the Executive last year. Not surprisingly, this gives a much more sensible result than the Exectutive's very superficial & self-contradictory report. Afterwards, down to Berwick to talk to the netsman about this year's small fish (and collect my Christmas order of smoked Salmon) and back to the office to get to work on the written version of the catch records analyses.

Tuesday 5th December : Catch records write up most of the day - a summary will be put on this site. Also preparing for tomorrows strategy meeting.

Wednesday 6th December : The annual Tweed strategy meeting this morning. This is when the Foundation's Trustees and the RTC's committee hear about what new work we would like to introduce next year. The great bulk of the Foundation's work is routine - electric-fishing, trapping, tagging etc. but most years something new or short-term is brought in, and this is the venue for formal appraisal and approval for this. The main proposal for next year is to complete the Tweed & Eye Fisheries Manual ( a description of the river and its fisheries and a compilation of the electric-fishing, trapping, tagging etc. data that we have and which includes the five year fisheries management plan). This has been in slow progress for several years now, but a SEERAD contract for all the fisheries trusts to produce management plans now gives us the opportunity to get it finished). A carry-on from last year is the trialling of a trap for use in the estuary, at a disused netting station. A key figure needed for any fisheries management is the Exploitation Rate (the proportion of a stock that gets taken by anglers) - obviously if  50% of your stock is being taken you are in a very different situation from if 5% of your stock is being exploited. For almost 10 years now we have been netting and tagging Salmon and Sea-trout in the estuary in the Autumn, hiring a netting station for the week after the end of the netting season on the 14th September and tagging everything we catch. This has told us that between 5 and 10% of these Autumn running Salmon are being caught by anglers upriver, which is easily sustainable. However, we need to know what the rates for Spring and Summer Salmon and Sea-trout are, but have found that the amount of netting we could undertake in those other seasons just did not get us enough fish. The idea of the trap therefore is to see if a different method can give us big enough sample sizes. The trap structure was made last year but trials never got started and these will now go on this Spring.

This is followed by the Tweed Foundation's annual lunch in Melrose.

Thursday 7th December : On leave.