Monday 12th February : The plan for the day was immediately upset by a last minute panic about the figures on fish size changes being published in the RTC Annual Report - had to check the spreadsheets again. All OK. A scale from a suspect fish brought up by a boatman - turned out to be a "Blue Salmon" . This is the traditional Tweed name for an "Autumn" fish that comes upriver to spawn in Spring i.e. though it is fresh into the river in Spring it is full of spawn and will do so very quickly. They are, presumably, "unseasonable", being close to spawning, but they are not Baggots in the usual sense of fish that have been in the river a long time without spawning, as they are fresh run. The latest I have seen fish spawning here is the the 29th of February 1992 (i.e the 1st of March if it hadn't been a leap year) but I have had a very creditable account of spawning on the 4th of April at Walkerburn. After lunch, working through the NASCO Implementation Plan and the SolwayTweed Eel Management plan for comments - and sending off a proposal to Natural England for crayfish work on the Till. A massive inquiry in from some consultants for Scottish  Water which would take a huge amount of time to answer, so more work plans could be upset.

Tuesday 13th February : Most of the day spent getting a poster presentation ready for the ART meeting in Wexford, Ireland, next week. Drift nets being the hot topic there, have taken the effect of the drift net buy-out on our catches here as the topic. It is difficult to pin down any precise relationship between numbers caught in the drift  nets and numbers caught in the Tweed but the effect was dramatic. In the three years before the buy-out, average Tweed rod catches were 9,446 per year: in the three years after, 14,210 an increase of 4,764 - which is exactly 50% of the pre-buy-out average. However, we know that the exploitation rate of early Autumn fish is only 10% or so, so an extra 4,700 fish or so should represent nearly another 50,000 fish coming into the river, far more than the drift nets have declared for many years. The numbers don't stack up, suggesting that the increase in catches is not purely due to the buy-out, though that must have been the biggest influence.

Wednesday 14th February :  Write up and send off comments on the draft Eel Management Plan for the SolwayTweed River Basin District. Under the Water Framework  Directive, all Europe has been divided up into "River Basin Districts" for the purposes of the Directive - there is one for all of Scotland and another for the Tweed and the rivers that drain into the Solway from both Scotland and England. Under another Euro directive, management plans are to be made for Eels, which as a species has suffered massive declines in its numbers throughout its whole range and as we are in the SolwayTweed RBD, it is the Environment Agency that has taken the lead in drawing up these plans (in the rest of Scotland, it is SEERAD that is leading on these). A meeting with the RTC solicitor to discuss my evidence in a pending poaching case - I have identified the fish scales on various items as being those of Salmon and Sea-trout. In the afternoon, work on a poster for display at the Association of Rivers Trusts of England and Wales (ART) meeting at Wexford in Ireland on Monday and Tuesday. As drift nets are a big topic in Ireland at the moment, have taken as the subject of the poster the effect of the drift net buy-out on Tweed catches. This actually gives me my first chance to really look at the figures and what becomes clear is that when the monthly catches for the three years before and after the buy-out are compared it is not just the catches in the months after the drift netting season that have increased - catches in the months before (which cannot possibly have been affected by the netting reduction) have also increased. In fact, the Feb-May catches since the buy-out in 2002 have increased by 25% while the average monthly catches after the 1st of June (start of the drift net season) have increased by nearly 50%. This strongly suggests that about half the increases in Summer and Autumn catches since the buy-out are due to other factors such as fishing conditions and increased angling effort.  Taking this into account, the estimate of the extra fish coming into the river as a result of the reduced drift netting comes to around 15,000 - 20,000 fish.

Thursday 15th February : Start the morning with some "late arrivals". An invitation to a meeting on Biocontrol of Crayfish at Stirling on Wednesday and a tag from a Salmon caught last November and only now sent in from Norway. As James has booked leave for next Wednesday, I will have to go to the crayfish meeting, though only back from Ireland the night before - and am going to the Institute of Fisheries Management AGM at Dunkeld on Thursday night as well (Richard Slaski, the consultant working on the Strategic Framework for Scottish Freshwater Fisheries is talking). On the plus side, Kenny phones in at 09.50 to say he has already caught a Grayling for tagging - today is when Michael Moore, our Westminster MP, is spending a day on the river and we want to show him some action. Meet and have lunch with Mr. Moore who gets a very quick look at the GIS and the Scale-reading equipment before we head upriver to meet with Kenny, fishing at Walkerburn, where he has 11 Grayling in the net (and has let others go in order to avoid overcrowding in the keep-net).  Demonstrate the tagging process and then head further upriver to Tweedsmuir, into the gathering rain and gloom. At the trap, the wind is hurricane force down the glen and only just manage to stand upright while explaining how it works and the incredibly useful data on trout population dynamics that we get from it. Abandon trap and re-locate to the office of the local landowner (a TF Trustee) to end the visit. Return Mr. Moore safely to Galashiels, so no bye-election as a result of the day.

Friday 16th February : Usual weekly staff meeting in the morning. On leave in the afternoon.