16th different 30 of the year from Cherry Lake. Shelf-life boilies banned.

I am delighted to confirm that our good friend Greg Harwar (who was a great help with Sunday’s stocking activity) landed just before dawn on Sunday morning the 16th different carp over the magic 30lb+ mark properly photographed in 2017.

The fish came from the middle of the lake on a small boilie over crushed boilies. Typical of this time of the year, the indicators simply pulled tight and did not quickly drop back which is what you would expect from a ‘line-bite’. At this time of the year I think it is always worth closely investigating these short ‘pulls’ which I would be inclined to strike on Cherry Lake ever time. Greg quickly struck to find this hard fighting Mirror on the end of his line. Greg who is a regular at Cherry Lakes had not previously landed a thirty from Cherry Lake and was delighted to have become the latest member of the 30+ club.

We have been expressing our general dislike of shelf life boilies for some while now. Why?…well they are often of poor quality, are frequently old and do not break down very easily on the bottom. In short they are frequently of dubious nutritional quality. Most of our guests seem to prefer to use the better quality freezer baits which are normally of higher nutritional value to the Carp and have the advantage that they break down easily in the water. Meaning that if the Carp don’t eat them the smaller fish and microbes etc can. This process takes a lot longer for shelf life’s with baits simply sitting on the bottom for a long period. As a result we are now banning the use of all shelf life boilies effective from 01 January 2018.

We will continue to allow anglers to use shelf life boilies as hook baits and pop-ups but not as feed. This applies to crushed boilies as well as whole ones.

Given that each of the Lodges and the Cottage have a freezer, there is no reason why anglers cannot bring their own freezer baits. For those who like to bring a lot of their own boilies, we also have several large ‘over-flow’ freezers that guests can use if the Lodge/Cottage freezer is full. For guests who do not want to bring freezer baits with them, the Tackle Den angling shop is less than a mile which stocks several leading freezer boilie brands. We also stock a range of our own high quality freezer baits, which we also feed to the Carp, which can both be ordered in advance as well as whilst guests are at Cherry Lakes.

I apologise if this decision disappoints some of our guests and causes some confusion in the future, but Just for the avoidance of doubt, we have taken this decision because we think that it is in the best interest of the Carp and all of our guests. We do everything we can to ensure that our fish are in the best possible condition, are healthy and growing. Good quality food supplied both by ourselves and our angler guests is central to this. I hope you all understand and are able to support this decision.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, we have taken this decision because we think that it is in the best interest of the Carp and all guests.