This evening I received a worried phone call from Craig as hatching had started at the mini-hatchery kept in the bike shed, with only about 20 ova to go yet… Craig is no stranger to hatching trout eggs, since he was already involved in the pilot project back in 2011, and he quite rightly thought it was too early in comparison to the previous years… However, it just shows how much milder the winter has been this year and all schools have witnessed ova hatching earlier. The set-up at the Hostel is also quite interesting as it only relies on an air pump to produce oxygen as opposed to impeller pumps to create a current as well as air bubbles and aerate the water. The big advantage of not using an impeller pump is that you don’t have to worry about eggs or alevins getting sucked up the pump and polluting the whole tank in a matter of days if not hours.

This is their set up: