Monday 8th March: Having had some good ideas over the weekend, revise the draft reply to the RTC's licence application and pass it on. Get through the e-mails. The acoustic listening stations and some of the tags arrive by courier, though Niall is down at Durham University today at a departmental meeting - tomorrow, he can start familiarising himself with the tags and the gear.  Read through a draft of  a paper on which I'm a joint author, on how the sizes and date of capture of salmon can give very reliable information on their sea ages, and how this can be applied to historic catch data even a century old.  Get some trapping data entry done at the end of the day as well. Kenny is busy manufacturing the trout catch logbooks for handing out at the beginning of the season and James is still working away analysing last year's electric-fishing results.

Tuesday 9th March: Now the tags have arrived, preparations speeding up. Select dates for smolt tagging by checking the trapping results from the past three years to see when the beginning, middle and end of the migration can be expected. The plan is to tag at these three times to see if there is any difference in survival or pattern through the season. In the afternoon, walk the Tweedmill stretch with Niall to find sites for listening stations.

Wednesday 10th March: An unusual occurrence today, the entire Tweed Foundation team (myself, James, Kenny, Barry and Niall) all together at the same event. This was the annual RAFTS (Rivers and Fisheries Trusts of Scotland) conference at Perth which this year had theme of managing conflicts, covering hatcheries & stocking (Nick giving a presentation on this), bird culls and aquaculture. Alarmed on arrival to find the Mafia present, perhaps attracted by the theme of the meeting, but then  relieved (slightly) to find out that this was actually a former assistant of mine, now working for RAFTS, who  had dressed for the occasion in pin-striped trousers, black shirt and jacket and pale tie. I missed the last session, having instead a meeting with one of the Department's scientists and my counterpart on the Spey, to discuss improving stock assessment methods in Scotland and how Trust biologists could collect the sort of data needed for better assessments to be made. We are still far too dependent on raw rod catch figures for our assessments - OK for general trends, but not for more precise year-to-year comparisons.

Thursday 11th March: Finished off a presentation on trout trapping on Tweed for the forthcoming Trout Management Workshop being held by the Eden Rivers Trust - this has taken the last few evenings to put together. Also finished off entering the trapping data from last year as well, so some progress being made.

Friday 12th March: Weekly staff meeting in the morning, then e-mails and admin in the afternoon. The agenda for the next Living North Seas meeting, in Ghent, has arrived, so need to prepare for that. One of the work topics is to collate data from all possible Sea-trout populations around the North Sea to see if patterns and common trends can be found. Nothing like this has been done before, so everyone working with Sea-trout around the North Sea has been in a vacuum, not knowing if their own particular populations are typical or different or if trends they are seeing are unique to their area or part of a common, large-scale, phenomenon. Niall has now found his way around the acoustic tracking stations - very advanced compared to the old radio-tracking ones which used cassette tapes to record the number of "beeps" from tags and paper print-outs to show what channels were being recorded at what time. Matching the two sorts of signal was done manually and then showed what number of beeps on what channel had been recorded and hence, which tag. These new acoustic listening stations download through Bluetooth onto a laptop which then shows the code numbers of the tags that have been recorded passing - couldn't be simpler.