Well, weather wise it's not been a bad week - until today!  The bright, cold days seemed to me to be ideal for a walk along most of the river so I went up to Low Birkwith on Tuesday looking for evidence of spawning salmon and found nothing.  Still, the river looked to be in fine form with plenty of duck about, a good clear flow and it was a delight to be out in the bright sunshine.  I made a similar trip down to Helwith Bridge on Thursday.  Again I saw no salmon, But there was a monster trout rising in the pool at Rowe End and again a lot of duck, especially down by the Pipe Pool.

These names remind me that we have almost completed the map of the fishery with all the pools and runs named for the first time.  Once this has been discussed with one or two long standing members to ensure that the names are valid we will make our work public.  It will certainly help to provide a common understanding of where places are on the river and offer new members a good basic understanding of this extensive fishery.

Despite my personal misgivings about Bill Oddy (for some reason he really irritates me!) I watched one of the Spring Watch programmes last week mainly because they were due to show some unique shots of spawning salmon on the upper Tweed.  These were mainly cock fish, but the interest lay in getting the camera down under water to give a salmon eye view of life on the redds.  It certainly showed just how much some of these big cock salmon suffer in their desire to breed.  One or two of the fish that came into view looked as if they had been through a shredder.  There were no real shots of spawning, but it was a good effort to capture river life as we rarely see it.

Keeping with TV for the moment.  I had one of those double take situations last night when watching Have I Got News For You.  I would swear blind that they showed a picture of the venerable member up to his navel in the Tarn.  This turned out to be an elderly bird watcher who became stranded by the rising tide, but the guy was the spitting image of SW.

I did the monthly bankside invertebrate check at New Inn yesterday and got very encouraging results.  Well over 80 heptagenia in the 3 minute sample as well as over 60 baetis nymphs and a good number of blue winged olives.  Two bullheads turned up looking a bit sheepish in the first two samples from the gravel bank below the bridge.  There must be quite a population of these fascinating little fish on this bank as I keep getting them in the sample net.  There were more stonefly in this sample than I have got before and one of these creatures was a giant at about 3/4 of an inch long.  I found quite a number of spent stonefly shucks or cases floating on the sample tray so it would seem that the stonefly are still emerging in the sun we had this week.

I will do a check at Turn Dub tomorrow and then post up the detailed results in an on-line spreadsheet so that all of our riverfly monitoring group can see them.

Finally, it looks as if the trees will be here on about the 26th of November so I plan to try to get them in on the first weekend in December after agreeing specific planting places with the landowner.  Volunteers to help heel them in would be welcome.

The weather has now taken a turn for the worse and its raining this morning with a real feel of winter in the air.  The forecast promises some wet snow or sleet here before the day is out so it's a day to be spent by the fire, I think.

More next week.

Ian