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.