the pride of derby fishing club( god bless em) have listened to their members via the forum on their web site. a few including myself had commented on the lack of sport on on of their ponds, so they did a survey and found hardly any fish.and pride being the responsible club they are published their findings and have just restocked the pond with five thousand fish.
the ponds closed at the mo to let the fish settle in but i goes down anyway just to observe kind thing and found they've gone great guns on the place by clearing away all the over growth that was there , building up one bank that had become a swamp and renewing pegs. Brill!!!
also they have put across the width of the pool strings attached to wooden posts that look like washing lines every five metres... apparantly they stop cormorants landing on the water (the reason it had become so depleted)
does anyone know if they work?? and what you supposed to do if a biggy tears off with your bait for a ride around the lake?? the restocking pictures bye the way can be seen at http://www.prideofderby.co.uk/gallery/thum...ils.php?album=4

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So what happened to the three buckets of pike ?
One photograph suggests that all the Pride of Derby were after were...pike. So why ? what happened to the pike that appear to be crammed into buckets with a cupfull of water in ?



[ 30. March 2005, 06:43 PM: Message edited by: argyll ]

when the lake was nearly empty there were found thirty seven mostly hungry pike.the bigger ones were mainly flabby empty fish becuase there was not enough food for them. due to the fact that the pond was depleted through predation they decided to to remove the pike from the water. do panic though they where all found new homes with club outside of the locality. full info here http://www.prideofderby.com/

Sounds very much like the problems our club lake is going through with cormorants. It had been fishing well until the cormorants decended now u struggle for a bite.
Have u thought about other methods of scaring, i recently saw a "scaryman" an inflatable orange man which pops up out a boat and lets off a sceaming noise, does any1 know anything about these?

the washing lines do work ,but ...they only work with corms that dont know what they are and are scared off when thinking of landing .
old cormorants just land between them and although they have difficulty taking off ignore them completly.
my local pond has 2 defences this year, floating islands with cages underneath and washing lines ,this winter though we have half the number of lines than last year and touch wood no noticable predation ,last year despite the lines a wily couple of corms were always there .
the lines we use are white flat electric fencing and pulled very tight so they strobe in the wind.

Pity about their attitude to pike! Spot of education needed maybe.

I dont know if it is the same now but in the early days of research into the cormorant problem you were required to try several non lethal forms of deterent before a licence to shoot them was issued.

Among these wer "The Scary Man" this is a self inflating man doll which is set on a timer to inflate thus popping up acompanied by a siren.This scares the birds for a short while but they soon get used to it.I have seen a cormorant sat on a Scary Man container positioned on the trout cages of a reservoir barely ruffle its feathers when the device activated!

Firework type rockets which make a loud screeching noise also are a suggested method which initially works but same again soon becomes non effective.With both of these the birds soon learn that they come to no harm.

Same for "crow scarers" and a lot of other traditional bird scarers.

Les Webber,at Angling Projects uses the "washing line" system on his water during the winter "closed" period.He hangs loads of CD's from the lines which spin and reflect light.Has been quite effective up to now but only time will tell if they will wise up to it or not.

Despite being a bit of a "tree hugger"! myself and not liking the idea of killing creatures (even if they do cause a problem) must admit that the most effective method Ive seen is the traditional method of shooting a few and leaving the bodies on display.Not as barbaric as some methods Ive seen used I can assure you.

We had a wily old corm on a water.
Whenever the game keepers or balif approached with a shotgun it buggered off sharp but always came back.
One of the estates deer hunters happened to turn up one day while the head balif and the estate manager were watching the corm.
It did not see the 303 projectile coming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(the deer hunter (part of deer control team) only had his cut down enfield 303 complete with a monster sized scope)
On recovery of the corm it had a small insert wound at the front.
It did not have a back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!