I thought that the autumn riverfly monitoring exercise we undertook yesterday went very well.  Eight of us gathered in the pavilion and very quickly agreed a plan of action for the morning.  This saw all of us down at New Inn bridge collecting the first (rather meagre) sample much to the fascination of a group of walkers who asked if we were killing crayfish.  Our explanation seemed to mystify them and they wandered off muttering about mad old men.  This initial sample exercise gave everyone a good idea of what is involved and whilst the material collected was washed and sorted a team went up to Selside and played in the river just below Cam Beck.  This was a much better sample with a high proportion of heptagenia and some stone fly larvae.  Finally, whilst the team sorted this catch a third party took the net down to the Tay bridge.

I will post up the detailed findings from the exercise tomorrow, but first indications are that there seems to be much less larvae present in autumn compared to spring, the creatures are smaller, but we did find a couple of ephemerids or true may fly and a larger number of stone flies especially at Selside.  There seems to be a variation in the range and number of species present at each site which if confirmed by future sampling will give members some useful info regarding the most suitable artificial to use on specific beats and season by season.

Yet again this proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable and absorbing exercise which served well to bring members together and stimulated discussion about fishing and the fishery.  We now have an expanded group of 12 members who have done the work so this should make future exercises far easier to set up.  What would also help we discovered yesterday is another sampling net, a clear key describing each of the 9 main species we are monitoring and a second hand microscope.

For those members who enjoy the pursuit of the salmon I have some data courtesy of David H which comes from the EA fish counter at Waddow.  This gives the number of fish that have passed up and down the counter and will include sea trout as well as salmon.  This is as follows:

	2006		2005		2007
Month	UP	DOWN	UP	DOWN	UP	DOWN
Jan	13	14	1	0	5	13
Feb	9	8	0	0	6	3
March	7	13	0	0	10	0
April	58	7	0	0	56	8
May	98	9	0	0	80	3
June	222	31	780	54	642	36
July	102	2	349	65	628	52
Aug	733	74	85	44	867	50
Sept	712	48	72	29
Oct.	1566	29	949	31
Nov.	172	6	144	14
Dec.	25	20	90	14
TOTALS	3717	261	2471	251

You can see clearly the impact of this wet summer in terms of fish numbers passing upstream.  This suggests that there are a significant number of salmon and sea trout already in the Ribble system.  All we need now is a drop more water!

Ian