Psst….Wanna See Some Naked Birds ?

We’ve all heard the old descriptions of anglers – “A worm on one end and a fool on the other” etc but the man in the street doesn’t realise what we see whilst we’re sitting quietly fishing and generally minding our own business. Right outside the “cabin” at Willinghurst there’s an ashtray just like you can see outside countless offices.

(Click on the picture to see a BIG image)

And inside there’s a Blue Tit nest

And now it’s full of naked birds !!

We were very quiet opening the lid to take the pictures and don’t fret, Mum & Dad are still visiting every few minutes with food for the babies. So there you are…naked birds or if you prefer it, a box full of tits

Old Lake Improvements

Work has now finished on the Old Lake. It has been de-silted and extended to give a total of 30 pegs on the lake. The lake was drained in March and all of the fish were moved to the adjacent New Lake. There was then a period of very wet weather making it impossible to get the machinery into place. Eventually things dried out and the diggers and earth movers arrived in early April.

(Click on the pictures to see a bigger image)

The Old Lake after all of the fish were removed and the last of the water has been emptied. All that’s left is a few acres of silt.

Here’s another view looking back to the island in the Old Lake. One of the diggers has been into the lake to check the depth of the silt…he got out alive !.

The diggers were skimming off over 20 years of silt build up.

It was quite a team effort. The bulldozers skimmed the silt off, the huge buckets lifted it into massive trucks and the trucks dumbed the silt in a specially prepared pit where it could dry out.

One morning Paul came out to find 2 deer had wandered into the silt field and got totally stuck

He managed to reach one of them and drag it to solid ground

Where he was rescued by the digger drivers

The other deer was too far away for Paul to reach it so the only alternative (apart from calling out Fireman Sam and his mates) was to scoop it out with the bucket…and that’s exactly what they did

Both deer were none the worse for their ordeal except for a bit of mud on their fur and they were last seen wandering off over the adjoining fields.

The last couple of pictures show Terry & Mick standing on the beautifully manicured lake bed and the lake as it was earlier this week, filling up nicely.

Hello world! 

Hi, I’m Ross, a Willinghurst regular and I spend most of my time staring at PC screens when I’m not fishing. I’m just back from a trip to Key West in Florida with Keith Arthur, Roy Marlow and a motley crew of hangers-on. You can read about the trip on The Team Gulp Blog . Before I went away I promised Paul that I’d take a look at the site for him. I thought that three years between updates was just a bit excessive, and an awful lot of things have happened in the meantime.

Let’s start with the current situation :

1) Oak Tree Lake has been extended

2) Old Lake has been drained, all of the silt has been removed and the lake has been extended. At the moment all of the fish from Old Lake are in New Lake (its next door neighbour). Old Lake is now being slowly refilled, it’ll refill an awful lot quicker if we have some rain. Once the water is back in Old Lake then New will be netted and some of the fish will be returned to Old. There will also be a restocking of new fish into both lakes.

3) After 12 months of fighting with the local planners, permission has been obtained to build a new match lake (John’s Lake) on the other side of the road to Old & New Lakes. Construction is well under way and they are hoping to have the new lake up and running in the Autumn.

I’m now going to update the bookings and to add a couple of match results. The plan is that this will then be kept up to date (provided that “proper” work doesn’t get in the way)

Tight Lines

Ross