Doesn't time fly when you are having fun?  Here we are, the last day of the brown trout season already and the past seven months seem to have flown by.  I will be in retrospective mood tomorrow, but all in all it doesn't seem to have been a bad fishing season.

We did some electrofishing on the main river yesterday.  After a false start that found us scratching our heads by the river just above the football field and contemplating a boulder strewn broad channel that was clearly going to be a nightmare to survey we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and decamped to Drain Mires where we could get the waggon right down to the river bank along side some very good salmon spawning gravel.  This area is very open and windswept with almost no bank side cover and some poaching of the banks by livestock so we had some apprehension about what we would find.  Certainly no brown trout as this is not good trout habitat.  In a 30 meter length we got over 30 salmon fry and a single salmon parr together with a host of minnow, bullhead and stone loach.  Not a bad result for 3 hours work, but it's evident that with a bit of judicial habitat work this area could become a super salmon and trout nursery.  The west bank here is well fenced already and the east bank is fairly high with a good uncut margin before it merges with the meadow behind.  A bit of bank protection and a few willows here would work wonders for both salmon and trout recruitment.

Depending on how the weather shapes up we may try to survey another river site early next week.  The aim is to get some reliable data about salmon recruitment on the higher reaches of the river before the hydro scheme becomes operative at Settle so that any changes in recruitment can be referenced against the situation without the scheme in place.  My big concern at present is that the work currently being done at Settle has closed the fish pass on Settle weir so if we do get some decent water over the next few weeks our salmon will find their progress up stream severely restricted.  The fish pass needs to be opened up as soon as possible and I find it rather surprising that the EA allowed work to be carried out here during the migration season.

Ian