Stock Pond delights!

One of my favourite activities of the year is our annual drain down of the stock pond. It is always good to see how the Carp have grown, as well as to 'watch the boys' clean up the stock pond (a seriously messy and smelly job). This year was no exception and there were a lot of pleasant surprises.

Firstly for the bigger Carp. Last year we retained and stocked the pond with around 15 Carp (C3's) in the 10-15lb weight range, having taken the decision to limit the number of Carp to around 50 (C2's and C3's).

As I understand it, Carp are aged by the number of summers they have survived. So this year's eggs/fry become C1's and those having survived two summers are C2's, and so on.

Typically the bigger Carp put on between 4-6lb, the biggest being the 21-04 held by Lewis above, which put on 7lb. Only one Carp did not do well, and in fact lost 1lb in weight! Presumably it is not well?

In total 11 Carp were transferred into Cherry Lake, and these typically weighed between 16-18lb. Our objective here being to broadly maintain the number of Carp in Cherry Lake (target is c300), replacing those which have died during the year with attractive young Carp which should thrive and grow in Cherry Lake.

Before updating you on the other fish in the stock pond, it is worth acknowledging the importance of keeping the pond clean. By removing a lot of the waste created by the Carp and ducks(!), we reduce the risk of disease outbreaks and improve dissolved oxygen levels.

To empty the pond, about half of the water is pumped back into Cherry Lake, and once the level of silt/waste starts to build up, the rest of the water is pumped onto the nearby grass banks (which captures the waste whilst the water disappears into the ground). The last few % at the bottom of the pond really is a thick soup of waste material which we suck out by a waste removal lorry (which normally carry septic tank waste).

As soon as we can, we then have to refill the pond (with up to 4 hoses pumping back from Cherry Lake) as quickly as we can to stop the ground water from damaging the stock pond liner. A real messy job indeed!

In order to give ourselves time to weigh properly and chip the stock pond fish, we have several large paddling pools for holding and grading the Carp. You can see above, that this pool was holding a lot of Carp.

Last year when we undertook the drain down, we discovered around 100 little Carp (C 1's). We then selected around 30 of these and returned them to the stock pond. The other 70 were distributed around other lakes.

The 30 C 1's retained were all selected because they were the fastest growers and/or, had good body shapes, and/or attractive scale patterns and markings, and/or they were Ghosties. We had to be quite ruthless in this selection process because we had to limit the Carp biomass to ensure the retained fish did well.

Well these retained Carp did extremely well, and the c30 retained Carp all survived and weighed typically between 4-5lb, with a good handful being over 6lb. They had certainly enjoyed their diet of Pellets and Cherry Red boilies, as well as the hot summer.

All of the C 2's were returned to the stock pond where we hope they will continue to do very well. Depending on their growth rates we may stock some of these as C 3's next year into our lakes, or retain them until C 4's when some/many could be around 20lb. Given the quality of these Carp, it is going to be exciting to see how they do.

As you can see from the lead photo above we had another bumper crop of C1's. They included some real stunners and we were spot for choice. We managed to whittle down around 300 to 45. These 45 were retained in the stock pond and the others found new homes. Many of them went into Cherry pool and should provide some nice surprises to float anglers on Cherry Pool next year.

Fingers crossed for another exciting stock pond drain in November 27 and some more pleasant surprises.

It would be remiss of me not to thank Simon, Darren, Lewis and Jack for all their hard work. Turning all this around in 5-6 hours certainly needs a lot of good team working. Well done guys.