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 ?.

Yesterday morning we returned for another netting session. The water was about a foot lower than it was on Tuesday and a cold night meant that there was a thin layer of ice over about 25% of the lake.

The water lowered in New Lake. We are looking towards peg 10 from the club house bank

I have to say that I was as cold as I’ve ever been. As the net was dragged across the lake it was collecting a  mixture comprising carp and ice, roughly in equal portions

Netting a mixture of ice and fish

As we’d walked round the lake we could see a few fish under the ice near the tree in peg 8, but nothing had prepared us for the net of fish that we were about to see

As the net was drawn closer to the bank, we could see that we'd caught a few !!

Now started the real hard work. Each of those carp had to be put into a landing net and passed up to people waiting on the bank who would tip the fish into a holding tank. Each fish had to be lifted from the mixture of ice slurry and popped into the landing nets. Hands went blue and all feeling was lost in them. In no time at all we’d filled two big holding tanks and the buggy was driven over to Top Lake for the fish to be unloaded. That whole procedure was repeated three more times, so one sweep of the net had brought us 8 holding tanks full of big healthy carp.

This picture was taken after we'd filled four holding tanks. You can clearly see the mixture of ice, muddy water and carp that we were reaching into to lift each fish into waiting nets

When the net was finally empty we’d moved over 400 carp including this amazing Koi. Koi keepers will recognise the variety as an Ochiba Sigure which roughly translates into “Autumn Leaves on the Water”, you can see that it’s an apt description. Nobody had ever seen that particular fish caught, nor did anybody remember it being stocked but it’s certainly a beautiful fish, which is more than can be said of the geezer holding it

Here's our koi. It's a super pretty fish.

With everybody frozen to the marrow we adjourned to the club house for a warming cup of tea. With everybody standing around chatting (and huddled round the fan heater trying to thaw out frozen hands), nobody noticed that the wet, smelly, covered in mud dogs had disappeared. Ah…here’s one caught in the act

The nice fabric covering on the settee was perfect for removing mud and lake water

We then returned to the lake and did one further sweep from peg 8 all the way round to peg 1. The silt in front of the club house was so deep that Terry the Cod couldn’t walk through it and had to float over the top of it

It was impossible to walk through the silt in parts of the lake. Terry had no option but to float around like a young whale

That drag of the net wasn’t too successful. The net got so full of silt that it was impossible to drag it and I’m sure that a fair number of fish swam around the ends. We did end up with 20 or 30 carp plus quite a number of small roach and gudgeon.

The final part of the New Lake netting involves lowering the level even more so that we are left with just a few puddles, hopefully full of fish. We can’t do that until this cold snap is over else we could end up with carp lollies as the water freezes from surface to bottom.

Earlier yesterday morning we also had a delivery of skimmers and crucian carp from a fish farm. All of the fish (around 300 lb of bream and 100 lb of small crucians) were put into John’s Lake

A netful of skimmers and crucians is moved into John's Lake

Incidentally, we took a random sample of 10 skimmers and weighed them. They weighed exactly 18 lbs

These ten skimmers weighed in at 18 lb.