DON AND DISTRICT SALMON FISHERY BOARD
SEPTEMBER REPORT 2008


State of River

River levels throughout September were good, up until the 17th of the month the levels were approximately 1ft above normal summer flows. There was then an increase of river flows by 1½ feet, putting the river height at 2½ft. From the 22nd of the month the river levels fell back to just ½ feet above normal base level, which is very similar to last year at this time.

Fish in River

The first half of the month was the most productive for Grilse being landed off the Salmon beats. All beats from the Lower Don up to the Monymusk fishing’s were landing salmon not in great numbers, but some of the beats were landing salmon on a daily basis. As you can see by the river height graph, once river levels increased on the 17th of the month a lot of beats were unfishable due to the very dirty water which lasted a few days, and even when the river cleared the angling effort was very poor. The Grilse run for September was not as encouraging as last year, but as the runs seem to be getting later coming in off the sea, October could be promising.

Coastal Nets

Closed Season

Salmon in the Class room

The four schools which were involved in the salmon in the class room project were taken out for field trips to the streams where their salmon they raised in the class room were released. Once at the sites we did some electro fishing, where we showed the children how much the young salmon that they released had grown. Whilst electro fishing we also got good numbers of trout and 1 brook lamprey which got the children all excited, as they thought it was an eel. After electro fishing we did some kick sampling at each site to show what invertebrates the salmon and trout will be feeding on at this stage.

The children watch from behind the safety zone as the board staff electro fish.
Hatchery

All the hatchery maintenance has just about been completed, and we should be ready to start catching brood stock for the hatchery in the first week of October.
This is the first year I have not been able to get any juvenile stock surveys done, mainly because of the wet weather during August. We did try several times once we had finished with the school projects but the weather broke and the streams were running too big to see any fish. Hopefully next summer the weather might be a little kinder with some sun shine and a few weeks of normal river flows.