Re: Forty years of being a bailiff

 The fishery started to buzz members were getting involved meetings were well attended two hundred plus at AGMs and between forty to sixty at monthly meetings competitions well attended and club outings even the dinner and dance was a sell out and had to be taken to a new bigger venue .the next development was to bring in some fishery expertise to get to the bottom of some of the fishery problems.I contacted a man from Birmingham named Ron Felton he was a big fella with a big reputation I new of him from the angling press for the catching of some big roach from the Nadder in Wiltshire . But he also lectured at birmingham uni and had his own fisheries and fishery bussiness .he came down for two days and stayed at my house we hit it off and became great friends over the next twenty years. He pointed out that the main problems were to many small fish to many of one particular specie namley Bream to little natural feed and the lake water was far to acid this was the main reason for no plant life in the magins and no weed growth the food chain was non existant and there was no quick fix he said get the water right and nature with a little help will do the rest So we drew up a four year plan The first step was to remove as many small bream as possible and sell them to raise some more money to help with the plan. A sample of ten fish was sent off to Thames water as it was then and the fisheries officer contacted me and said they were infested with ligular tapeworm and that they could not be moved and would have to be destroyed on site and that netting them out and destroying them was the only way to reduce the infestation. It was not  what we wanted to hear but the members could see it was for the best and the job was done every year for four years the rmaining bream got bigger and this went a long way to keeping members happy also small stockings of good quality roach tench were going in . The water impovement plan involved getting the PH up to 7 from 6 which was very acid and fertilizing the lake bed We started by liming the fishery and dressing with super phosphate things started to improve slowly at first but increasing in speed as time went on .The food table was very low small fish did okay for their first two or three years but not a lot for them after that. So we decided to introduce a supplementory feed during the close season in the way of soaked wheat and trout pellet the first year five hundred pound of each the difference was amazing the quality and weight gain was beyond our dreams anglers were saying what have you been feeding these fish they are fighting like mad even the bream are trying to fight so we upped the anti  I baught  ten hundred weight of best wheat and two tons of trout pellet from BP mainstream it cost about £10 per cwt bag I sold it to the members for the same price and to other clubs at a profit it worked out all in all it cost the club next to nothing at its peak we had a ton and a half of feed going in for five years .we had another survey done by Alwyne Wheeler at the end of this period and he said untill you have a natural habitate to support the fish you are carrying you must keep on feeding . In the mid 80s I knew of a water that  had a very simular problem and they had treated the water with Siltex . T.B.C.

Re: Forty years of being a bailiff

Siltex is a chalk product that I had been told about years earlier but it was imported from France as champagne chalk it has an exceptionally small grain size and it is that small that it can get between the grains of silt and cause several benificial things to happen But anyway a english company that have a quarry in Needham Suffolk found a seam of this perticular chalk and started to market it we consulted the experts and they reckoned about seventy metric tonnes in two dressings first dressing forty tonnes then twelve months later another thirty tonnes it had to be put in as an emulsion  so we used the big zodiac that I obtained from a friend of mine it had been used in the transworld expidition he bought a few of them to referb the cells were filled with expanded foam were fifteen feet long six feet wide built to carry stores we could carry a tonne at a time and pour the siltex into the outboard well and let the prop do the mixing. The members turned up to unload the first forty tonnes from the artic that delivered it it had to be stacked and covered this was in early november and four of us started work on putting it in the next day it took us from 7am till 9 pm with members turning up though the course of the day to help out. It was a bit  disconserting to see the lake looking like it was filled with milk it stayed like that for months it did not seem to effect the fishing in any way it had still not cleared completly when it was time for the next application in the following november . We went through the same procedure again with thirty tonnes. the following year nothing much happened and members were saying it was a waste of effort and money but things were starting to happen things that they could not see but for me who spent nearly as much time in the water as the fish it was happening .There was some critercism of myself from some quarters and I told them that when it went it would turn into a meadow from bank to bank top to bottom they laughed  the following year it did just that the water went crystal in early march everthing settled out all the suspended solids were taken to the bottom of the lake the siltex activated the stored nutriments in the silt the sunlight penetrated the lake for the first time in thirty years and WHAM! the weed life exploded and the food chain with it . How we dealt with the weed will follow.T.B.C.

Re: Forty years of being a bailiff

 Very interesting Greg 

Re: Forty years of being a bailiff

 For those of you that have your own memories of that night in 1987 15th / 16th of October my youngest sons sixth birthday you will remember it for the rest of your life. By the morning at least seventeen people dead and hundreds injured homes wrecked and the countryside ripped apart . The Bec  was like a bomb had hit it trees uprooted the few big trees over fifty year old were upended enormouse holes in the ground where thier root systems had been torn out the sunken islands in the middle of the lake were torn apart the biggest looked like someone had driven a forty foot artic though the middlle the east end of the lake was piled high with all sorts of debris tress plants the remains of resident garden sheds and fences broken branches piled six fet high it was a bloody mess phone calls were made and the members got stuck in two JCBs turned up and about thirty members on the first day the big trees were the biggest problem as they were on the lake boundry and had crashed though the fences they were up to fifty foot high when they were standing . We cut off the bulk of the top growth put wire cables on them and pulled them as upright as we could using the Jcbs then supported them with props and staked ropes we managed to save the vast majority of the tress that had gone over in this way the broken timber was gathered into piles and burnt it took weeks to just clear the debris let alone getting to work on the destroyed islands that needed to be rebuilt and replanted . One or two of the club members were roofers and with all the damage that was done they had work for months all of the old roffing tiles ended up over the lake we had tonnes of them coming in every week these are what we used to rebuild the islands with and another member had a landscape business and all the soil needed for topping off the islands came from this source it took two years to rebuild those islands hundreds of tonnes of hardcore and topsoil ferried out on the big zodiac and a 18 foot delquay dory and a fair few of the workers ended up in the lake all persons that worked on this job wore life jackets gradually the lake with a lot of help from the members started to recover but not befoe we had anothe big blow a few years later but this time there was some warning but again the lake took a bashing but not like in 87 .Two of my friends were fishing another water near Chelmsford the night of the big storm in 87 one of thier wives had dropped them off in the middle of the countrside and was picking them up the next day they had most of their gear smashed by falling trees and were very lucky not to get injured they spent most the night laying down in the middle of an open field with what the could salvage around them they were not picked up till late the next day because of the blocked roads.TBC

Re: Forty years of being a bailiff

Interesting read, lot iof work gone into your fishery. Remember the stroms well. Stuck in Tunbridge Wells that day all the roads blocked and walked in the local park. Looked like a bomb had hit it. Hardly a tree standing.

The power of nature is awesome. Sometime before this had a sea storm wash over the beach in Deal kent. Lamp posts bent at 90 degrees and a several tonned bull dozer moved 50 ft across the seafornt road. I woke up looking at the sky with a 6ft hole in the roof. Slept right through it, gave up drinking after that. But, it is frightening what nature can do; never under estimate it.