Angling Lines Blog

The 80lb Mandarin cat goes back home to the cat lake next door!

The recent stock check at Lords received such resounding approval from anglers that Laurent Bigot has decided to repeat the task at Morgane.

The first step was to remove all unwanted fish from the lake. Along with a number of small carp, 4 large cats between 40 and 80lb were removed. The cats have now been put back into the adjacent Morgane cat lake where they belong.

No one knows why or when these cats were moved from the cat lake to the carp lake. Perhaps some anglers did it for a laugh, but when you consider the enormous amount of bait an 80lb cat can sweep up in just one pass, it’s not so funny for carp anglers who are unaware of their presence.

Of course, there’s nothing at all wrong with having big cats in a carp lake, just as long as both the anglers and lake owners know that they are there. Anglers can adjust tactics and lake owners can adjust their winter feeding programme to accommodate the cats.

The presence of these 4 large cats could also go someway to explaining the mystery of why the larger carp had dipped in weight last year. It could ultimately have led to catastrophic results.

The 50lb common!

Anyway, the cats are now back where they belong and Laurent has adjusted the lake rules to make it clear that moving fish between the carp lake and the cat lake is strictly forbidden.

In the final phase of the stock check, Laurent will be producing a list of every fish in the carp lake and we’ll be publishing this as soon as we have it… hopefully next week.

In the meantime, we were there earlier to see the removal of the cats and we had a sneak glimpse of some of the bigger carp. We saw lots of 30′s and 7 carp over 40lb. One common weighed in at 22.7KG. That’s just topping 50lb.

We’re all looking forward to next week when the full stock check takes place and those weights will be confirmed, but it’s looking like both the cat and the carp lake should produce some stunning catches in 2011.

Here’s the video of the stocking which took place recently at Lords.

In summary the following was stocked;

• 4 x 40’s
• 38 x 30’s
• 41 x 20’s
• 14 x cats to 70lb+

You can see more details in these 2 Blog posts… Part 1 here … & Part 2 here

Last week (w/c 18.10.10) Laurent stocked seven catfish from 35 to 65 pounds into Lords.  The 7 stocked brings the total number of cats in Lords to 14.  The weight range is between 30lb and 65lb & included in this number is a rare mandarin yellow cat of 40lb.  No photos I’m afraid  :-(

Laurent also confirmed that he has added another 88lb cat to the cat lake at Morgane and a 60lb cat to Commons.

112lb cat from Morgane

Mr Wrights party have had a bumper cat session at Morgane taking 11 cats for a total weight of 485lb.  The largest was 112lb & that was caught by Mrs Wright.  The cats were caught in daytime on halibut pellet or squid.

They also had 11 carp from the carp lake giving them a total catch weight for the holiday of 922 lb of fish.

Dave and the Molyneux lake record catfish of 45lb

There has been two lake record catfish caught at Molyneux this August.

The first was a 41lb cat caught from swim 5 and whilst waiting for the photos a 45lb cat fish was caught from the cabin swim by Dave on a Baitcraft T1.