This weekend REF members were lucky enough to receive a Riverfly Workshop by experts Dai Roberts the welsh David Bellamy and Yorkshires Peter Pan of flyfishing, Stuart Croft. Things kicked off Saturday with me and Dai sorting the R/A and workshop room pictured below, pretty impressive me thinks.
Luckily everyone had their clocks sorted with an hour forward and we all kicked off on time and couldn't get going quick enough.
Around 11am we all took part in the wader race
once tooled up, down to the riverbank for the practical display of kick sampling and things to consider.
While we were sampling we observed some real kick sampling demonstrated by a dozen horses from our local stables, luckily they were downstream of us so they didn't affect our sampling, although we were all stood mouth wide open for a while.
We made our way back to the workshop room with our samples and after taking lunch we got stuck into the findings. We got what we expected really with the Erewash being under stress - both caddis, olives, stonefly, gammarus and a few extra leather jackets etc none in huge numbers but important to us all the same. Being thrown back to our school science class was fantastic, bringing us all to the average age of 12yrs.
Dai and Stuart had the thankless task of putting complex invertebrates info and identification along with effective sampling across to some that weren't even fly anglers, but they completely succeeded in giving us all the confidence to assist the EA in monitoring, an amazing achievement really, well done and thanks.
River Erewash Foundation (R.E.F)
Steve
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