With the necessary licences in place from the Environment Agency and with the expert assistance of Martin and Phil from “Moore and Moore and Carp”, the first three days of this week saw us netting Christine and Pepper lakes.
The aim was to remove the build up of silver fish (more about these in a separate update) and provide more growing room for the specimen carp. None of us really to new what to expect, but Martin and Phil had warned us that, depending on a variety of factors netting the lakes would only be between 20 – 40{340fbc4567e7038043a32d8ec5201da99e0c15731aca33f338993b4f37000627} effective. However, its safe to say that the exercise exceeded our expectations with odd surprise thrown in for good measure. Although the over-riding objective was to remove the silver fish, we also took the opportunity to catalogue the specimen carp. We hope to provide a gallery of those fish we catalogued separately but here is a taster of how we got on.
Day 1 – Christine Lake:
We made 5 sweeps of the lake covering its entirety followed by a final sweep re-covering the most prolific area of fish.
Hauling in the net.
Expectation mounts in anticipation of the catch!!
These were just a very few of the highlights.
A 34 lbs Common, one of two plus 30 lbs carp caught in Christine.
27 lbs Common Carp
A very fine eel estimated to weigh approximately 4 lbs!! Not at all what we were expecting but a very welcome find and which was returned.
One of the many pike returned to the lake.
Fish were netted fairly consistently across the lake resulting in our removing approximately 2500 – 3000 lbs of silver fish.
Days 2 & 3 to follow.