Dear members,

Well, it is about time I gave everyone an update on what we have been up to with regards to our fisheries this year, I took over in August as the Coarse Vice Chairman as we were in the middle of several projects that we needed to complete.

I will start with the City stretches of the rivers, these saw a few well attended works parties help clear out a lot of the swims and maintain some of the fences and bridges ready for the winter match season, thank you again all who took part. The results in the first few matches have been very promising with some large roach caught from close to the city. We are starting our own Coarse Fish Spawning and Recruitment Project (CFSARP) in the new year, with the support of the original Avon Roach Project to improve natural recruitment of coarse fish fry in the City stretches of our rivers.

The future is looking good for the middle stretches of the Avon with several specimen fish being reported, double figure barbel, 2lb roach, big pike and chub to well over 5lb.
We will be improving access and have a robust maintenance plan that will be implemented over the next 12 months for White Horse, Folds and Burgate stretches.

This year at Petersfinger we have:
Installed two different new aeration Systems in both Hands and Clarks Lake.
Cut lilies and removed excessive waste.
Pursued aggressive tree work to open the lakes up to wind and reduce the amount of leaf litter in the future.
Executed netting surveys and started stock balancing on Clarks and Hands lakes

Air stone and Force 7 aerator in action

With regards the netting and stock balancing, we are concerned about the amount of biomass that is in the lakes and to enable our movement towards a pair of self-sufficient mixed fisheries, we needed to know what we were dealing with.
We knew we had to remove a lot of the small roach and rudd, to encourage the remaining fish to grow, this decision was based upon a fish sample that was taken in January 2020 and showed that the average growth rates of the roach in the lakes were very low.
The specimen pike and carp will be moved into Clarks lake over time, as we are stocking Hands with tench and crucians. This is because the smaller pike will predate heavily on the crucians and they also hybridise with king carp (Cyprinus Carpio) so by removing these threats we will give them the best environment to thrive.

So, to the netting:

On the 17th November we netted Clarks lake, we removed over 200lb of small roach, and returned over 100lb of good stamp skimmers, perch and roach to the lake to grow on.

On the remaining dates we netted Hands lake, in total we removed approximately 600lb of small roach, rudd and some small jack pike.
We transferred 3 pike of between 7lb and 10lb and 2 Carp to 30lb into Clarks lake.
Finally, we returned 270lb of bigger roach, perch, skimmers and tench to 5lb 8oz back into Hands, over the 3 days netting.

This sort of management will become the norm as we move forward with the lakes, they are old gravel pits and need quite a bit of environmental management and active stock control to ensure the water quality does not go in the wrong direction again, as this was the root cause of the 2019 fish kill. We will be managing the lilies more aggressively and working on reducing the size of snags around the lakes to make netting easier and the fishing safer.

As for stocking Hands, we will be receiving tench and crucian brood stock from the EA to help re-establish them, but in the short term we have stocked 100lb of 1lb 4oz-2lb tench already this winter, into Hands lake.

Steeple Langford, since the fish kill, we have taken a light touch approach to this water to allow it to settle naturally whilst we monitor multiple water quality parameters monthly. The planned fish survey had to be abandoned as the heavy silting and need for long net lengths in White Bird lake proved impossible to manage for the very few, but much appreciated volunteers, who had offered their help for the day. We will return to this activity but if we cannot muster enough volunteer labour from within the club, or due to social distancing and other COVID-19 restrictions, we will consider alternative ways to achieve this important element of our plans for this venue.
Swim clearance and basic maintenance will continue as normal as we consider options for the future.

I have a couple of requests over the next year, to allow our continued improvements our venues we need people to help on works parties, throughout the year. We have a lot of bankside and water to manage, if you have any availability or want to help in the future please get in touch at the email below. We will find a job for everyone.

We have also been really pleased to see some of the catches that have been coming out of our waters, they have been getting shared on social media and posted onto the Coarse Fish gallery on the webpage, it can be found here https://salisburydistrictac.co.uk/coarse-fish-gallery/

We love hearing about all your catches so please continue to report them, so that we can get your photos onto the website and our social media outputs allowing our other members see what there is on offer across our waters.

I would like to thank quite a few people for their continued work behind the scenes to develop the projects and carry out the hard work when my day job gets in the way, firstly Paul Barnard and Dave George for their help on the many projects over the last couple of months.
Then there is the works party team of Frank Gumbleton, Jimmy Smith, Kev Deverill, Tony Roff, Lee Higgins, Colin Sellwood, George Stainer, Gordon Pidgeon, Gary Taylor, Shaun Gumbleton, Dave Docherty, NicMac and Malc Peperell. As without their help we would not have achieved as much as we have on the rivers and lakes.
To the keepers, bailiffs and the rest of the committee for their continued hard work and effort as we look towards another busy year hopefully with a little less disruption from COVID-19.

Finally, many thanks from me, to you, our members for your continued support, I can only tell you that we will be spending many hours planning and working hard over the next 12 months to continue the improvements on our entire portfolio of coarse fisheries. This may involve a small amount of disruption, but please bear with us as it will eventually come good.

Ben Bentley
Coarse Vice Chairman
Salisbury and District Angling Club