It's another rather damp start to the day here in the valley with just the occasional glimpse of blue sky amongst lots of low cloud.  Yesterday morning was better and the Tarn looked stunning in early sunshine with a gentle breeze rippling the surface and an army of coots busy doing coot things.  I moved on the cormorant bobbing on the water by the cross wall and sat in the lodge for a while whilst the swan family slowly ambled up from the duck wall to check me out for a snack.

It's always rewarding how quickly life at the Tarn settles down if you just sit quietly watching from the lodge windows.  The more nervous residents that shoot into the reed beds to hide emerge and carry on with what they were doing before you arrived and a sense of calm descends which permeates ones soul making it very hard to eventually stir and get on with whatever job was in hand.

After giving the returning cormorant a nasty shock with the clapper board that sent him winging away down river I went up on the hill to take a look at the new river crossing.  Much scaffolding has been erected in the past couple of days and the steel anchors for the bridge seem to be in place so it looks as if the bridge sections will be swung in to place maybe next week.

I was talking to Neil Handy on Tuesday and mentioned Gavin's monster trout with the big tail.  He thinks that this will have been a sea trout and on reflection I am inclined to agree.  The fish had clearly been doing some serious swimming to have developed a tail like a salmon and it takes a lot of inverts to grow a 4 lb trout.  Hopefully this big fish will pass on its genes this winter be it male or (as I suspect) female.  If only a percentage of the parr we are currently seeing in the river now reach maturity over the next couple of years trout recruitment should increase dramatically.

Ian