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.

If you’d like to enter then please book in with Terry on 07949-174555.

Fish must be weighed every 4 hours and keepnets can be hired from the cabin for £5 plus a £25 deposit. Each angler can use a maximum of 2 rods.

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.

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.

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

The normal Wednesday Open was moved to New & Old Lakes because the RAF had a match on Top Lake. It was interesting to compare results with those of the previous day (the floater match). Conditions were better on Wednesday, less wind and definitely a lot less rain. Results proved that chum mixer wins hands down !!. Malcolm Fowler won it from peg 2 on New Lake with 87 lbs and I was lucky enough to be second with 75 lbs from peg 10 on the New Lake. When I drew it I was highly vociferous about the merits of that peg (it’s tucked into a bay that can be devoid of fish on occasions). Mick in the cabin told me to fish along the bank to my right at about 10 metres. That was lucky because the day before a combination of 3 anglers had managed to break my 6th section completely in two whilst trying to separate sections stuck together in the rain, so I was armed with my 10 metre Maver H10 edge pole. I started on the method feeder but with no bites in the first hour and a half I decided to give the edge peg a go before departing for an early bath. Fed a big pot of corn and first cast the float buried and an 8 pounder was safely netted. It got a bit quiet in the middle of the match, in fact I nodded off a couple of times but I picked up a few more fish towards the end of the match to weigh in not many carp for 75 lbs. The moral of the story….don’t bitch about your peg until AFTER the match, you’ll feel awfully sheepish going back for the results if you’ve caught after bad mouthing the peg to all and sundry.

Saturday’s match on the Top Lake fished pretty well in dreadful conditions with a strong wind, teeming rain and not at all warm. I was lucky enough to draw peg 23 on the back spit and fished the little method feeder all day for 178 lbs. Don fished cat meat in peg 8 for 140 lbs and Terry Harrison also weighed in a “ton” from peg 25 on the spit. All in all good weights in pretty poor conditions.

I’m off on holiday on Wednesday. I’m going to British Columbia on the sunny west coast of Canada (actually it might well be cold and raining, their weather is much the same as ours). I’ve got a few days on Vancouver Island fishing for Salmon and Halibut in the ocean then I move over to the mighty Fraser River on the mainland for some sturgeon fishing. I don’t want to hijack the Willinghurst site but If I get round to writing anything I’ll post a link here.

Ross

After much flattery and a little bit of arm twisting, we managed to talk the management team into letting us have a match where we could use floating baits. The date was set a couple of weeks ago and lo and behold the day turned out to be wall to wall rain and winds gusting up to 30 mph, not exactly perfect floater weather. However all those booked with the exception of Mick Keeper actually turned up. The rules were that there were no rules (just like the old days) .

The wind made it that it was virtually impossible to fish floaters in some pegs but in the ones with a bit of shelter the fish were ready to oblige. The top 3 weights all came on chum mixer, with Brian Green winning it from peg 1 with a cool 216 lbs, I was a couple of fish behind with 203 lbs 10 oz and Ian Hogg made up the top three with 156 lbs 12 oz. Don Garnish had the best weight fishing “on the deck” with 94 lbs 1oz. I always knew that the dog biscuit would outfish any other method but it was nice to get it confirmed.

Here’s a few observations, mostly aimed at the people that continue to badmouth the method.

1) Those weights are by far the biggest that have been caught from that lake for over a year. Who knows what we’d have weighed in if the conditions had been more favourable.

2) The fish that were caught on the floaters are DIFFERENT FISH to those that are caught on the bottom. They average between 7 and 8 pounds each. This seems to destroy the argument of those that insist that any bait floating past them ruins their bottom fishing. Give your head a shake and open your eyes, they’re not the same fish. The fish that are caught on the surface DO NOT FEED on the bottom except for a few of them that move into the margins in the last hour of a normal match. I didn’t see a single fish under 5 lbs weighed in by those people fishing chum mixers yet if you fish the method feeder you won’t see a fish over 5lbs. When you’re bottom fishing and chum mixers float past with a few fish rising don’t get so upset. Those rising fish are not your fish, your fish are still on the bottom, they can’t see up through 2 or 3 feet of muddy water. If your bottom fish were to move up to eat the mixers then there would be smaller fish caught on the mixer but it just doesn’t happen….EVER !!.

Anyhow, the experiment is over for the time being. If you wanted to fish but were not invited then I’m sorry but it really was for regulars and the ‘old-timers’ that used to fish dog biscuits there when it was allowed. The fishery is back to the normal rules of “NO FLOATING BAITS” and “NO BREAD”, so please abide by the rules.

Ross