Category: DAA News

On thursday, the first of two Archimedean turbines was put into place at the Totnes hydro scheme. It was planned to locate both of the turbines into their channels but delays to their arrival only allowed enough time and daylight to install one of them, with the other re-sheduled for the next day.

A 300 tonne capacity crane stood waiting, ready to unload the turbines and swing them into position.

When the turbine eventually arrived there was a short pause to attach the linkage that will transfer the drive to the generator’s gearbox and to adjust the crane’s lifting strops.

With this done the turbine was lifted again and swung into position above its channel.

The other screw was due to be installed today (fri 13th!). We hope all went well.

The coffer dam should be gone within about two weeks and the plant is due to be working before the end of next month.

The fish counter will also be installed and should be working before the start of the 2016 season. The counter is long awaited and will be invaluable in the management of the river.

 

The following quote is from the DTRIP report and describes its scope. The project has recently come to a conclusion.

“The Dart & Teign River Improvement Project (DTRIP) was a Defra-funded Catchment Restoration Fund Project administered by the Environment Agency. The project was written and delivered by the Westcountry Rivers Trust, and steered by its catchment partnership…”

“…This report documents the works delivered under the DTRIP and describes how these works were targeted to ensure that efficient on the ground management was delivered effectively throughout the catchment.”

You can see the full report here. It is a pre-publication copy and contains a couple of mistakes, which you will easily spot. The authors are aware of this.

Catch return forms for the 2015 season will be sent out to members soon. Please complete them and send them back to Hon Sec as soon as possible to give Phil time to collate the information in time for the AGM. If you can’t wait to receive your form by post, here is a .pdf copy.

Catch return2015

Would members please keep an eye out for a black C reg Mitsubishi with dark tinted windows. The owner is suspected of illegal fishing. If anything suspicious is seen please call the EA hotline 0800 807060.

Would members please note there will be No Season Extension for salmon fishing this year and the season will finish as normal on September 30th.

Given the very difficult year experienced with fungal disease and the introduction of the emergency bye -law restricting salmon fishing to ‘Fly Only and Catch and Release on July 22nd I am sure members will feel this is the right approach.

For anyone in the market for a new landing net, Fastnet have some on clearance at the moment.

http://www.fastnetsports.com

As an aid to understanding what might have been going on in the Dart for the past couple of years, the following link is to an abstract of a paper that gives a more detailed pathology of UDN.

Ulcerative dermal necrosis (UDN) in wild salmonids

There is a suggestion that the disease we have been observing may not be UDN. However, the article above appears to describe precisely the appearance and consequences of what we have been seeing.

The good news is that at least one shoal of clean sea trout has been spotted  in the river recently.

Apparently one or two members have said that they preferred the old look website to the new. As designer of the former I have to say that I agree to a large extent. However, the new WordPress site has several advantages over the old and is much easier to administer.

Previously, some degree of tech savvy was required to merely to post an item on the news page. For instance, text and photographs had to be manually formatted and care had to be taken not to affect the formatting of items previously posted or even overwrite them. Having composed the item it was then necessary to use an FTP client program in order to publish to the correct place on the server, making sure that any dependant files were also uploaded correctly.

With WordPress, contributors can compose posts and pages much more easily, with formatting being done automatically. A press of the ‘publish’ button is then all that is required to make the item live. The drawback is that although some customisation is possible the overall look of the site is largely constrained by the chosen WordPress theme.

One of the features that we have been hoping to add for some time is to have newsletters available on the website. Owing to the fact that these newsletters occasionally contain privileged member information, it would be necessary to have these in an area only accessible to members. This is easily done with WordPress and it is hoped to have this up and running in time for the next issue.

With many users, including visiting anglers, now accessing the site via smartphone or tablet it was essential to make it accessable to these devices. Again, the WordPress theme makes this easily possible, working equally well on all types. Anglers can for instance now check maps or fishing regulations on the river bank.

These are some of the advantages of moving to a WordPress. Undoubtedly there are some as yet undiscovered that will make this site easier to use and administer.

Apologies then to those of you who preferred the status quo but one hopes that you will warm to the new look as the site becomes more familiar to you and that you will understand why we see this as the way forward.

Several more pages have now been added to the site, with more to follow. All of the pages on the menu are available, although you might still encounter the odd broken link.