It’s been a while so here is a quick summary of what’s on offer in our 11 lakes :-

Main Lake – Specimen Carp to 35lb and Perch up to about 4lb

Christmas Tree – Specimen Carp to 38lb (as at Sept2011) and Perch to about 4lb

Pittance – Mixed species, Carp to around 15lb, Roach, Bream, Chubb and Barbel

Oak Tree – Carp to 12lb and skimmers

Cherry Tree – Carp to 15lb, Perch to 4lb, Roach and skimmers

Top Lake – Carp to 18lb and Roach

New Lake – Carp to 4lb (new stock back in 2009)

Old Lake – Carp to 21lb, Chubb, Roach, Tench and Perch

Horseshoe – F1 Carp to 25lb and Roach

John’s – Carp, Tench, Crucian, Chubb, Perch, Bream, Tench, skimmers due to be restocked with Bream and skimmers in February

Half Moon (New this winter) – Bream and skimmers

The big Carp (20lb+) will be being moved out of the stock pond to Main and Christmas Tree this year

The netting party about to get wet and muddy.

The water level in the stock pond had been lowered by pumping the water into the lake below and over half of the surface area of the lake was now mud. However the deeper area was still too deep to net efficiently with the fish getting under and round the net. We did manage to net around 500 carp ranging in size from around 8ozs to 2lb, and these were all transferred to the New Lake. Terry and Paul spent a few hours netting yesterday and they moved around 800 fish.

This is the typical size of the fish that were moved to New Lake

We are hoping that the water level will have dropped further tomorrow for another attempt at netting out the stock fish.

A pair of HUGE machines were working in New Lake which has been completely dredged and remodelled to give 5 – 6 ft of water in every peg.

Machinery working on New Lake

Most of the lake bottom was now hard clay except for a big lagoon that held about 10% of the original silt from the lake.

The Silt Lagoon ready to be spread over the lake bottom

This will then be spread evenly over the lake bottom to kick off the natural filtration system that is found in every healthy lake. It’s amazing how quickly these huge machines can move vast quantities of earth. It took the bulldozer about 10 minutes to transform a huge mound of earth into a smooth, gradual slope.

Anyhow, all of this industry on the New Lake was making a fair bit of noise, so I decided to sneak a couple of hours peaceful fishing on Pittance Lake. Armed with a tin of sweet corn and a few 2mm pellets, I fished the pole about 2 ft outside a clump of reeds and had 10 carp between 3lb and 12lb plus a lovely tench of at least 4lb. A brilliant few hours on a wonderful sunny afternoon. Ain’t life great ?.

The warmer weather has encouraged a few fish to feed, in fact in the last week we’ve had carp of  24lb, 25lb and 27lb caught from Main Lake. Two of them were caught early morning, the other in the middle of the day so there’s no need to freeze during the night time hours if you want to catch a specimen fish.

On Wednesday of this week we had a visit from Roy Marlow, the owner of the much-loved Glebe Fishery in Leicestershire.

He was able to offer some good advice as to how we might improve the fishing on the lakes. Roy’s theory is that you can pile more and more fish into a lake but unless the fish are happy then they just will not feed. His main advice was that we should plant some different reeds that will help to filter the water in the lakes. He also gave us some other ideas on what we might try to improve water quality in order to make our carp “happier” and therefore hungrier. None of his suggestions offer an instant fix but he’s convinced that the waters will improve steadily in the next three years and that in three years time the fishery will be as good as it ever was.

Top Lake
We had a heartbreaking fish kill on Top Lake caused by oxygen defficiency following an algae bloom crash. Thundery ‘heavy’ nights during the height of summer are always very dangerous times for fish-keepers and heavily stocked fisheries. At the time of the fish kill the lake was as green as I’ve ever seen, it was so thick with microscopic algae. Overnight a vast proportion of the algae died and in the process, sucked all of the oxygen out of the water. When the fishery staff arrived in the morning they were greeted by a lake full of dead and dying carp. A high powered pump was immediately brought in to pump water through the air into the lake, and many of the suffering fish recovered brilliantly, however there were many casualties. It’s impossible to move fish during the height of summer, so there was nothing that could be done to restock until this winter.

John’s Lake

Just a few short weeks after the Top Lake disaster  KHV was discovered in the small carp in John’s Lake. As I’m sure you know, KHV is a virus that attacks carp and it can wipe out anything between 20% – 100% of the stock. We lost about 25% of our little carp but the remainder now seem to be thriving. Incidentally, although nobody knows exactly how the virus is carried, the evidence in this case is that the virus was introduced via anglers keepnets or landing nets. A small proportion of the little carp had been moved to our stock pond. We then held a couple of matches on Johns Lake and two weeks later KHV was discovered. None of the fish in the stock pond have been affected, it is still KHV free.  One of our biggest worries are the new rigid plastic net bags. They stop your wet nets leaking into the car boot BUT we’ve seen people turn up for matches with nets still soaking wet  from he previous week’s match. It’s so easy for diseases to be spread from fishery to fishery via wet nets. Please ensure that your nets are totally dry before putting them into the lakes, it’s the only way that we can control this deadly disease.

Main Lake
The level of the water in main lake was lowered in early spring in order to net the lake and remove some of the small carp that were eating the carp anglers baits. The netting went very well and several hundred pounds of small carp were replaced by an equivalent weight of large ones from a couple of the lower lakes. Sadly, we then suffered the driest spring and summer in living memory, meaning that there was no water to top the lake back up. Luckily we had a very wet autumn and the lake is now overflowing.

Christmas Tree Lake
A similar story to Main Lake. The level was lowered to enable us to net the lake and remove some of the small bream and roach to be replaced by large carp. Again the levels stayed low all summer but the lake is now topped up and ready for the warmer weather to stir the fish back into life.

Just returned from an awesome trip to Canada and although I promised not to derail the Willinghurst news I just had to give you a few highlights. I spent the first week and a half on the West Coast of Vancouver Island fishing for salmon in the ocean together with halibut, ling cod and even a few tuna. Highlight of the time over there was a day fishing for salmon where our limit (4 fish) comprised 3 x 30 lbs and a forty pounder and on that day we caught and returned over 20 twenty pound salmon plus a thirty pounder.

The second part of the trip was a return visit to the Fraser River just outside Vancouver. This was the 6th time that I’ve fished for sturgeon in the Fraser and for the past 3 years I’ve been trying to beat my personal best of 8ft 10 ins, I was desperate for a 9 foot sturgeon. We had some amazing days on the trip, including a bunch of 3 consecutive days where we landed 22, 18 and 21 sturgeon. I also managed to catch an acrobatic six footer for the cameras of a team making a film promoting Vancouver to be shown at the Beijing Olympics (Vancover host the 2010 Winter Olympics).

I’ll recount the full epic story elsewhere, suffice to say that on the final day of the trip I landed this monster

(Click the thumbnail for a full sized image)

It measured 9ft 1 inch from the snout to the fork of the tail (that’s how they measure them in Canada, in the USA they measure to the tip of the tail but everything’s always bigger in the States !!). The girth was 46 inches and weight for length tables put it at around 400 lbs, there’s certainly no way that 2 of us could lift it.  As I said, I’ll post a full story of the trip with loads more pictures somewhere and I’ll pop the link on here.

Whilst I was away a whole bunch of Willinghurst regulars took a week long trip to Stafford Moor Fishery in Devon for a little festival. With matches every day, competition was bound to be fierce and it was going to take a good angler to come out on top. Lo and behold, the outright winner by quite a margin was Terry “The Cod”, one half of the new Willinghurst management team. Not only did he weigh in in excess of 100 lbs on all but one day, plus picking up over £1,000 in sweepstake winnings, he also relieved Mick The Bookie of £500 (£50 at 10/1) !!. Well Done Tel !!

Fishery maintenance tasks now completed include a path plus fishing platforms around Horseshoe Lake and an almost completed path around Old Lake, the boys have been working extremely hard whilst I’ve been jetting back and forth. More news soon.

Ross

You must be sick of me writing about matches all the time so I thought that I’d tell you about some exciting events at the venue. As from 1st August Terry and Mick who run the cabin and the open matches have taken over running the whole fishery. Paul, who used to try and run the fishery AND the estate is still around but will be involved more with the forestry and general work around the estate.

(Click on the image to see the full sized photo)

Terry (aka “The Cod”) on the left, Paul in the middle and Mick looking very official on the right.

Both Mick and Terry have supposedly got “proper” jobs (hard to believe since they’re always fishing !), so it’s not decided yet just which days the cabin will be manned. They do have some great ideas on improving the fishery and the fishing. Proper swims will be constructed on the revamped Old Lake and they’ll be built on Horseshoe Lake also. John’s Lake is now completely full, in fact it’s a bit TOO full which has uncovered a problem. The lake builders haven’t got the banks quite level and the lake’s leaking in one corner. They’re going to have to lower the water level (it will be pumped into the newly built stock pond and returned later) whilst a bit of rebuilding is done on a section of bank. If you’re over there you’ll notice that there’s a single platform at the far end of the lake. That’s the prototype of the platforms that will be constructed around the lake. Side boards will be added to stop stuff falling off the platform and into the water.

There are some big plans for moving some of the fish around the various lakes. The plan is that all of the very big carp will be moved to Main Lake and Christmas Tree Lake whilst at the same time an equal weight of smaller carp will be taken from those two specimen lakes to replace the big boys in the match lakes. Chatting to a couple of the pleasure anglers the other day they were saying that there are at least three different 20 lb carp in Top Lake. Now I’ve match fished that lake literally hundreds of times and I’ve NEVER seen a 20 pounder weighed in on a match. You’ve got to assume that they only feed at night or when the lakes are very quiet and it’s those fish that will be netted and moved to Main Lake to be replaced by smaller fish that will hopefully feed a bit more frequently. These are projects that just couldn’t be done whilst Paul was trying to do so many different jobs around the estate and I’m convinced that once it’s all completed, everybody will be happier with the quality of the fishing.

Incidentally, I’m always ready to post any news of catches and / or pictures on here from the pleasure anglers. If you do catch a whopper and there’s somebody in the cabin they’ll always be willing to come up and photograph and weigh it for you on our match scales. I’ll get you a number to ring in case you’re fishing on your own and don’t want to leave your gear unattended.

I promised to post a couple of pictures of the drained lakes. As you’ll see the Old lake is filling nicely and they’re expecting a delivery of fish later this week

Click the pictures for bigger images

And there’s even a drop of water in the newly dug John’s Lake. The island in the middle of the lake will actually be a sunken island once the water reaches its correct level

I have some very sad news from Willinghurst, we’ve had a bereavement and everybody is upset about it.

You’ll remember our Blue Tits that were nesting in the ashtray outside the cabin, well yesterday was the big day, their first glimpse of the big world outside of their little home.  Terry and Mick were around doing odd jobs and noticed a little head poking out of the ashtray. Soon there were 3 little heads and as the chicks became more confident they hopped out onto the rail and sat there for a few minutes looking around and doing a bit of wing flapping. Ken, Katy and Kevin, three beautiful little Blue Tit chicks.

It was soon clear that Kevin was a leader, an adventurer, there was nothing that Kevin feared. In just a few short minutes he flapped his wings and made his first flight…all of about 10 feet before crash landing on the grass. Within 2 seconds of him hitting the ground a magpie had swooped down, killed him and flown off with his body. The lads were stunned, how could that happen in a split second ?.

Ken and Katy had seen what had happened and they had no intention of following in Kevin’s footsteps….they sat firmly fixed to the rail. Mick and Terry found a thin stick and offered it to the chicks as a perch. Lo and behold the chicks stepped straight on to it and then spent an age, sitting on their new perch as they were paraded around the cabin. The Cod has a great picture on his phone of them sitting on their perch besides the box of biscuits on the counter of the cabin. Once we conquer the technology I’ll post it here, it looks great on his phone.

As dusk was approaching the lads decided that the best chance for Ken & Katy was for them to be placed in the hedge at the side of Horseshoe Lake. Hopefully they’ll be safe there until they have the strength to fly properly and evade the predators that are waiting to kill them.

As fishermen we frequently see the great sights (on Sunday there were House Martens flying around the lake and they were making frequent stops to sit and rest on peoples poles), but thankfully we rarely see the cruel side of nature. It’s sad to see that in nature, as in human life, the bullies seem to triumph over the good guys….a sad day !.