Happy New Year from all at Cherry Lakes
Sam Kudrek makes a fast start with a lovely 38lb Mirror
Wednesday 1 January 2025
Happy New everyone. We hope you and your loved ones have a happy, healthy and fulfilling 2025..........and may you catch the Carp of your dreams!
Wow another New Year starts. I know it's a sign of old age when you swear that the years are going faster........but they are!
It is now, almost unbelievably from my perspective, 12 years since we welcomed our firsts guests to the Cherry Lakes Lodges in 2013. We will continue to strive to live up to our claim of being the UK's leading Carp Fishing Holiday venue and do our best to ensure all of our guests enjoy their time with us. Hopefully all of them will leave relaxed and with some great memories, some with their new Personal Bests.
Normally we are closed over the Christmas/ New Year period. However as we were at home for the festive period, and with the weather being mild, I decided to take a couple of very late enquiries. Both of the anglers are pleased that I did.
Sam Kudrek fished over the new year period on his first visit to Cherry Lake and is leaving a happy man. He caught this stunning heavily scaled Mirror of 38lb at 10pm to comfortably extend his PB. Sam was pleased he followed my advice to not ignore the shallows as he caught this cracker from just 3 feet of water.
Sam's Carp is the first entry in our 2025 30+ catalogue. Interestingly this Carp does not appear in my 2024 30's catalogue, in fact I had to go back to our 2023 edition to find this fish which was caught by Gavin Price at 35-10.
I said in my 2024 Cherry Lake annual report that we had a number of Carp on the 'missing list', and it is good to start the year with one of them.
As a reminder we recorded in the 2024 catalogue 72 different Cherry Lake Carp over 30lb, including 11 different 40's to 46-10. Providing I can get my act better together this year and make sure we get good photos of all the 30+ Carp caught (obviously I really need the help of our angling guests to achieve this), and avoid an natural disasters, I am confident we will exceed 80+ in the 2025 catalogue.
Sam's Carp above is typical of some of our bigger Carp, in that they are only gaining weight more slowly than we would expect of relatively young fish with good frames. I mentioned in the 2024 report that we have been disappointed about the increase in weights being recorded by our bigger Carp over the last year or two.
Following expert advice we will be moving to a new policy of angling guests only being able to use our in-house boilies and pellets from 01 March 25. I will cover the rationale for doing this, as well as changes in our bait range, in a separate update within the next week.
Kevin Brown also phoned for a last minute break and was lucky enough to be able to stay in Pochard Lodge with his family over the New Year period. So far he has landed 4 Carp over 20lb, including this 28-04 Mirror above and this 23-08 Common below. A nice way to start the new year. We look forward to welcoming both Kevin and Sam back again in the future.
Happy New Year.
