Monday 19th July: Electric-fishing scheduled for today, but no bankside machine. Data entry and catch records analysis in the office all day, plus e-mails and admin.

Tuesday 20th July: Another scheduled electric-fishing day today, but the equipment didn't arrive back from Inverness till lunchtime, so worked on the catch records display for the education centre. After lunch, all down to the Leader below the office to get started - and found the electric-fishing machine still had exactly the same fault. Packed up and back uphill to the office, phone calls to Inverness, did what tests we could, no progress, so decided to take the machine back to Inverness myself, have it repaired and bring it straight back down - it's easy for me to do this as I can stay at Pitlochry anytime, breaking the journey. Off in the evening.

Wednesday 21st July: Up early and off to Inverness from Pitlochry, getting to the electronics workshop just after 09.00. Machine still shows the same fault as yesterday but changing some connections sorts it out. As have all the cables, the anode  & cathode & the generator etc. with me set the whole system up as a test, and find that there must be another fault in some other component as it doesn't work in that set-up.  Trace it to the cable which has obviously had water in it & end up with a new cable and the anode being completely rewired. Set up the system again and this time it works, so back off down the road to Pitlochry.

Thursday 22nd July: Back down from Pitlochry in the morning, and set off with the team to electric-fish a medium channel site on the Bothwell. These sites are 500m long and are aimed at sampling takeable sized trout in the size of channel that anglers can fish. However, just past Earlston a message came from the advance party that had been sent on ahead to check that the water was too high, so back to the office. Out then with Shaun to the Tweedsmuir trap to carry on with repairs and dig out the gravel.

Friday 23rd July: A very quick weekly staff meeting, then out to catch up with the electric-fishing. First site on the Ale Water, near Ancrum. Lots Baggies and Beardies, some trout fry and half a dozen Eel as well as the dominant Salmon. This site was 18.5m long and around 12m wide and produced 136 Salmon fry and 26 Salmon parr - but with quantitative electric-fishing the total population of a site is calculated using the diminishing catch totals of the three electric-fishing runs, in this case 82 in the first run, 33 in the second and 21 in the third.  A standard statistical formula is used to convert these to an estimate of the total number of salmon fry at the site which is always more than just the sum total of the three runs - the same is done with the Parr. The second site today was on the Oxnam at Crailing, where there were even more Baggies and Beardies, seven Eels, five Grayling fry, just a few trout fry but a good number of older, larger trout up to 170mm. Again, Salmon were the dominant species, with 234 fry and 38 parr captured. It's a good illustration of the difference in scale that there is between the numbers of salmon fry and the numbers of adults in a salmon population to think that these 234 fry were taken from a bit of stream just 5-6m wide and 24m long in a very minor tributary, yet a fishery on the main Tweed that caught 234 adult salmon in a season would be regarded as a fairly good beat. The reason for this difference in scales is, of course, that female salmon have several thousand eggs so there is  massive over-stocking with eggs followed by a massive die-off as numbers of juveniles are thinned out to the numbers that the local carrying capacity (the amount of food and space) can support - this is illustrated by the fact that at both these sites though the numbers of fry are in the hundreds, the numbers of parr are in the tens. The fact that the smaller site had the more salmon also illustrates the difference between natural carrying capacities - while the Ale Water site had a conductivity measurement of 226, the Oxnam site's was 365 showing the latter to be much  more chemically rich / productive than the latter, a difference that was also clear in the size of the fry - at the Ale Water site, only two fry were bigger than 65mm in length while at the Oxnam site, there were 74.