I went up to Turn Dub this morning to complete the invertebrate check for September. The weather is perfect with plenty of warm sunshine, a little broken cloud and almost no breeze.  The river needs a flush through.  It's full of filament weed below the Dub which made sampling tricky and not a little tedious extracting the wee beasties from the weed in the net.  The results are very encouraging and much more representative than the samples we took from the first three sites on Thursday.

The predominant family this time is undoubtedly baetis.  Each of the four samples I took came up crawling with them ranging in size from the almost microscopic to some quite decent sized specimens.  The prize of the morning though must be the biggest stonefly I have ever seen. This monster of the deep was nearly an inch and a quarter long and looked as fit as a fiddle.  He/she went back were I found him/her.

Simon has lost his head again I guess removed by a passing cow as I fixed his head on pretty securely last time I was at the Tarn.  I shall have to fettle a new one of something less attractive to passing bovines.  I think it must be the orange plastic bags I have been using that attract the cows as his first head which was white lasted a season without being munched.  The fishing return in the hut shows that catches have been fairly light over the past few days so I will go ahead with the planned stocking on Tuesday despite the fact that there is now only just over 4 weeks to go to the end of the season.  With the river so low it will be good to ensure that the Tarn is fishing well.

Ian