Pre-season update

It's been a fantastic and exciting winter for Exclusive Angling Holidays! In November we drained and netted the lakes for the first time and last week we took delivery of a batch of stunning fish to top up the existing stock. Safe to say now I can't wait for the season to start...



Rouge

In Rouge we removed all of the small catfish and bream leaving the bigger cats and all the carp.

Also we were somewhat surprised at the snags that extent of the snags in front of the double swim. We managed to remove, with the help of a big digger, 11 enormous tree stumps covered in line and loads of leads. There's no excuse for lost fish anymore!





Since the draining I have removed a lot of the overhanging trees and snags on both sides of the swims one and two and also most of the overhanging and submerged trees on the far bank.
All this work will provide better fishing and allow the bigger fish to put on plenty of weight.


Vert

Vert wasn’t much of a problem at all except that the drain became blocked and William had to go down the tower in the dark to remove a large lump of concrete.

As with the other lakes, we removed the bream and smaller cats to allow the remainder to grow faster. In addition we were able to remove all the overhanging trees so the big fish now have nowhere to snag people.



Bleu

Bleu wasn’t anything like as problematic as Rouge and we did exactly the same by removing the bream and smaller catfish. The biggest surprise we had came when we pulled the nets for the first time and found a rather large 100lb+ catfish. With a variety of weight estimates I can only guarantee one thing and that is that I will need bigger scales as it will certainly bottom the 125lb scales I currently hire out!



As I have now finished removing snags from Rouge, Bleu is my next challenge which will be completed before we re-open in April. Snags wise Bleu hasn’t got the problems that Rouge had but there are a lot of overhanging trees to sort out.

Finally last week we took delivery of some new Carp to supplement the existing stocks including some gorgeous fish, both commons and mirrors.





I am currently feeding these fish on a daily basis when the lakes aren’t frozen.
I will start tweeting again so keep looking -- you can also stay in touch via facebook by clicking on the link below.

Tight Lines

John James