Twelve fish. That is what four coracle men took from the River Tywi across the entire 2026 season, from May to July.
One of those fish went to Keith Elias, whose family has fished this Carmarthenshire river for three centuries. He told BBC Wales the situation was dire.
"It's been in my family for so long, I love carrying the tradition on, but it's getting to the point where you get to the end of the season and you're not hitting fish," Elias said. "You just don't want to go."
The method is old and specific: two round boats of hide and lath, worked at night, a net drawn between them for salmon and sewin, the Welsh sea trout. It stopped paying wages long ago. What has kept it alive is tradition, and tradition needs a catch.
Andrew Davies, 63, chairman of the Carmarthen Coracle and Netsmen's Association, measured this year against 38 seasons.
"I've been fishing for 38 years, I've never seen a season as bad as this," he said. "When I first started, this river was black with fish, it was alive with fish. But it's gone now, there's no life in the river."
"People have just, I won't say given up, but the enthusiasm's gone," he said.
The campaign group Save the River Tywi has recorded evidence of industrial, agricultural and human waste pollution. Independent sampling by the Carmarthen Riverside Association, with help from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, found raised phosphate, nitrate and nitrite levels across the lower catchment - one May reading of 2.50 mg/L of phosphate maxed out the test equipment.
July's Tywi River Festival did not happen. Russell Sparks, mayor of Carmarthen and holder of the historic title Admiral of the Port, gave his verdict when it was scrapped.
"The evidence is clear, the river is dying, we must act now if we don't want to see the extinction of our salmon and sewin as predicted by 2030 by NRW," he said. To the BBC this week he added: "Over the last couple of years it's been really sad to see it, feel it and smell it."
Local suspicion has focused on a licensed outfall connected to the Mekatek electronics recycling site at Johnstown, after the coracle association posted footage of discharge, as Nation.Cymru reported in July. Mekatek said it shared the concern about declining sewin numbers, that it had spent more than "40 years developing and improving our processes to ensure we are not a factor in that reduction", and that "anyone wishing to understand what we do and how well we do it is more than welcome to arrange to visit the site and view our operations for themselves."
Natural Resources Wales said foam at the outfall may be a by-product of treatment rather than a pollution indicator, and that an intermittent fault in the site's anti-foam dosing system had been fixed.
Huwel Manley, NRW's head of south-west operations, cited pollution, dry weather, warming water and broader ecological pressure, and confirmed the regulator is not merely watching: "We currently have a number of ongoing enforcement and compliance investigations within the Tywi catchment, including cases that are progressing towards court proceedings."
The Welsh government's line is harder to reconcile with the netsmen's accounts. It said NRW had looked into reports of foam, smell and discolouration and "confirmed the impacts were linked to natural environmental conditions".
Welsh Water, under pressure after the neighbouring Teifi logged 2,232 spills across more than 22,000 hours in 2024, is putting £889m into storm overflows between 2025 and 2030, six of those projects on the Tywi. "This isn't just an issue for water companies," the company said. "Collaboration is needed across sectors, including industry and agriculture."
Carmarthenshire MP Ann Davies, a farmer, wants tougher enforcement against persistent polluters and does not spare her own sector: "We have a collective responsibility on what we buy, what we flush down the toilet."
Andrew Davies says he reports incidents constantly. "Nothing seems to be done. I think something needs to be done to clean the rivers up in Wales, people have been dodging the bullet."