Happy Christmas.

As is our normal style we have sent a Christmas e mail to all our past guests and friends and I recognise that most of the readers of these dates fall into this category. Just in case you did not receive this e mail or are a prospective new guest, I thought I would open up here by just repeating couple of the key messages it contained.

The biggest message was of course to wish you all a very happy Christmas and a happy healthy 2021. I hope you like our lead Christmas photo for 2020.

We also wanted to thank everyone who has previously been to Cherry Lakes and their on-going support. The longer we are open, not only do we seem to have a higher proportion of returning guests each year (past guests account for at least 70% of our bookings), but we also get increasing proportions of new first time guests as a result of recommendations.

It is always a great confidence booster for the team here, and confirmation that we are broadly getting things right, when we see so many returners and especially new guests from recommendations.

As I said earlier thank you for your on-going support.

The first 3-4 months of 2021 unfortunately look like they might be even more difficult than 2020. I very much hope we are able to open during this period (we are currently tier 2), particularly as we continue to think our Lodges are ideal for fishing from and staying in. It is not too hard to envisage a further national lockdown. If we do, I am not sure what I will do with myself, as there is nothing sensible to do and we have exhausted the budget!

With the new variant of Coronavirus apparently being more contagious than before, the next few months could be very hairy! Whilst I appreciate why the medical authorities need to ensure the Oxford vaccine is safe, given the huge risk to health of the virus and further damage to the economy, surely the balance of risk should require an immediate approval of this vaccine? This way the majority of the UK population could be vaccinated by Easter. I for one will get my vaccine at the earliest possible date.

We very much hope you all manage to avoid the virus over the coming months and stay safe. If you don't, we hope it is not too severe for you and you make a full quick recovery.

We have been extremely busy over the last couple of months heavily investing in further improving the Cherry Lakes experience and environment.

I have previously mentioned that we have installed new aeration systems on the three smaller lakes as well as investing in more Force 7 aerators for Cherry Lake.

We have taken advantage of the absence of guests to bring forward our tree work and undertaken repairs to the outside of all the Lodges and fishing areas.

The collapsing bank on Cherry Mere has been re-enforced and re-built (all manually as we could not get machines near it......I am really glad this is behind us as it makes me tired simply thinking about it!). You can see the cage and new bank in the lead photo above. We 'poured so much money into the ground' on this repair, it would have been more appropriate if the rainbow above started here! The 'pot of gold' actually started to the right!

We have literally just finished the last chunk of major work. This was to repair and improve the fishery road. This took so much longer than I planned for. This has involved 'boxing-in' much of the road to hopefully contain the spread of the gravel (see photo two above ). We have re-built much of the bank along the south bank of Cherry Springs (see photo immediately above). As part of this we have also put in place a series of 'safety posts'. This is to hopefully stop any cars/vans straying off the road onto the softer made up bank.

Unbelievably we have applied 80 tonnes of gravel around the fishery road and we still very nearly ran out of gravel.

Hopefully as you can see from the suite of photos here you can see the improvement despite the drabness and wet of winter!

I will just finish by again wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a safe and happy 2021.

Roll on the Spring by which time we should hopefully be approaching normality.

Stay safe and take care.