2024 Cherry Lake Report

Wow! Another year gone by. Where does the time go? My normal practise is for me to produce two annual reports, one for Cherry Lake and the other for the exclusive lakes. However due to the quality of the fish being caught from the exclusive lakes and not knowing which photos to drop, I will this year for the first time produce a report for each lake.

As regular followers know, I have not been as focussed on Cherry Lakes as in past years. A combination of Grandparent duties and a couple of bucket list trips has meant I have been both away more and more distracted than in the past. This has inevitably meant that I have missed some of our big fish captures and they have not made it into my 30lb+ 2024 catalogue. Regardless there are still a lot in there, including Marc Campion's Mirror of 44lb above!

As well as reporting on the fishing, I have also included details about two major investments made across Cherry Lakes as well as one near disaster.

As before I have selected some of my favourite photos of the year.

The biggest Carp of the year as recorded in my catalogue was this stunning heavily scaled Mirror caught by one of our long term regular and good friend Andy Watts at 46-10, pictured above. I am confident that this beauty will be our next 50lb+ Carp. This is a relatively young fish which has put on 5lb over the last year and has the frame to keep growing and fill out.

The running total of different Carp over 30lb from Cherry Lake in 2024 stands at 72, of which 11 were over 40lb. These numbers are down on 2023 when we recorded in the catalogue a total of 84 different Carp. My feeling is that I may have 'missed' around half a dozen which were caught and/or sent photos which were not good enough to confidently identify the Carp caught. There are also another half a dozen which have probably evaded capture. We certainly have 4 of last year's 40's on the 'missing list' (and we are confident they have not died). Hopefully some or all of these will turn up in 2025.

The details for 2024 are as follows. We had 61 different Carp out between 30-40lb of which 40 weighed in between 30-35b, and 21 between 35-40lb. Of these 35 were Mirrors (including 9 fully scaled Mirrors), 21 were Commons and 5 were Ghosties.

In addition we had 11 different 40's ( 7 Mirrors, 3 Commons and one Ghost Mirror) which included 3 over 45lb (2 Mirrors and one Common).

I have noted in previous updates that we are disappointed with the overall growth of the Carp in Cherry Lake. Over the last couple of years we have not seen the general weight gains of the past. Having talked to a number of experts, as well as analysed what has been happening here, we have concluded that the quality and quantity of the feed going into the lakes is not as good as it should be.

Despite having a ban on shelf-life boilies, it is surprising how many anglers still bring and use these boilies. We have also noted the use of low quality 'frozen' baits. Equally important is that it is hard to keep a check on how much bait anglers are introducing to each lake.

So, in order to ensure we can better understand what is being put into our lakes (which can then be properly balanced with our own supplementary feeding), we will move to a position where only boilies purchased from us can be used in 2025.

I will confess to have been reluctant to do this, I am an angler after all who often prefers to use my own baits. However I am not the first to conclude that controlling the type of boilies, and understanding the quantity, of boilies being fed into the lakes is the best way forward. Many leading fisheries in England and France have already made this move, and I now understand why.

We will look to carry a wider range of quality frozen baits next year to ensure our guests feel they have plenty of boilie choice. I will write in more detail about this in a subsequent dedicated post.

Our biggest investment this year was in significantly upgrading our WiFi across Cherry Lakes by having our own dedicated high speed fibre optic service installed. Our own dedicated cable is almost a mile long from where it joins the high speed network. This investment,which totals around £25,000, was deemed necessary because our existing BT Affinity WiFi service was steadily getting worse and we had no confidence Gigaclear (who are rolling out the Government's rural WiFi programme), were going to link us up in the foreseeable future. Indeed we suspected we would fall between the cracks! Hence we had to do it ourselves.

I am very pleased to confirm that our WiFi has been very reliable since September when it was installed. We have good fast download speeds consistently around 50 MBS Per Lodge. This speed is good for streaming services and ideal for anyone wanting to base themselves in the Lodges or Cottage whilst 'working from home'!

We have also invested more in people. In particular Simon Littmoden, a fishery management consultant, regularly stands in for me and operationally runs the business for Judith and I when we are away. As well being an excellent Carp angler ( a couple of photos here pay testament to this fact), Simon is extremely knowledgeable having run his own carp lake for over 10 years and has a good and very personable relaxed manner.

Even better he has taken over updating our Facebook page during this last year, which is why followers of our Facebook page have seen a sharp up-tick in the quality and level of postings.

Last year's major investment in our Dissolved Oxygen (DO) monitoring and management system after some initial teething challenges is now working well. We are able to remotely monitor the DO levels and remotely turn on the aerators if required. Perhaps more importantly if it falls below our relatively high (approx. 45% saturated) pre-set level, the big splash aerators are automatically switched on. These certainly help me sleep during known high stress periods such as thundery weather and autumn algae die-offs.

The near disaster of the year was a fire within Heron Lodge. This was caused by a Lithium battery exploding within the Lodge. Fortunately this happened just before bed time and the anglers concerned were able to get the battery (which was sitting on a chair!) out of the Lodge before the fire took hold. It was still bad enough to require us to replace the table and chairs, flooring and deep clean the whole Lodge.

The proliferation of cheap bait boats and Lithium batteries is a major concern for us. We are in the process of building a fireproof lockable area outside of the Lodge where all Lithium batteries and bait boats are to be stored in future and charged as necessary). Batteries and bait boats will be banned fro being in the Lodges going forwards and I will write about this separately when this work is completed.

I would like to finish this annual report by saying thank you to everyone who has visited Cherry Lake over the last year. We are always delighted to welcome new guests, but we are especially grateful to the on-going support of our regular guests, many of whom have been visiting for years. It is only with your on-going support are we able to keep investing in Cherry Lakes. We look forward to welcoming all of our guests in 2025.

I thought I would finish with one of my favourite photos of the year. Long term regular James Hine with one of our home grown babies. Definitely one for the future.