We had the mother and father of a thunderstorm here yesterday afternoon which persisted into the evening.  The rain was torrential and by early evening the river was in full spate and heavily coloured.  It turned showery later and remains so this morning with a light easterly breeze.  The river is still very high and the colour has yet to drop out so fishing will be a bit of a challenge today.

Barring any last minute hitches, our riverfly refresher training is all now in place for 19 July.  With a bit of luck we will have enough water on the river to enable us to sample easily (if this stormy weather persists we may have too much!) and the aim is to expand the knowledge we gained on the original course in May 2007.  We are now getting pretty reliable data each month, but what is less evident is how we use this data to inform our understanding of the health of the river.  For example, is what we find what we should expect to find or are the volumes within families and number of families indicative of an underlying and persistent problem that we need to address?  We also need to explore ways in which we might assist our native invertebrates to recruit and thus increase the amount of food available to our native trout.  Finally, we need to find ways to share our knowledge with members so that they can be better informed about the predominant prey species available to trout throughout the fishery and thus make better choices about which flies to dress, the size these flies should be and where to fish them month by month.

It should be an informative and enjoyable day.

Ian