Dan with an Oakwood beauty!
I bet if I was stood in a room with 100 carp anglers there would be 85 hands up in front of me by now. It must be most anglers dream to have there own fishery whether it be at home or abroad. It certainly was my dream as a boy to have my own carp lake many days were spent sitting on the side of rivers and lakes around the UK dreaming of the prospect.
Almost 30 years has past since then and I now find myself as the owner of the beautiful estate lake Oakwood in Brittany France. In this article my aim is to provide a glimpse of “the dream” and give a realistic insight of just how much hard work it actually is and maybe not such a dream after all!
I will start by describing the lake, it was dug in 1862 by the owners of the chateaux , I think since then it has been largely left to its own devices, to develop naturally shall we say.
Swim 1 before clearing work started
When I purchased the lake I could see the potential but I definitely under estimated the amount of work involved in getting the lake ready for commercial fishing. The best way I can describe it, is as a house that needs to be stripped right back to its shell, have the foundations looked at and start again!
This translates to having a 5 acre lake covered almost totally in lily pads and a horrendous amount of natural weed, on top of that was the removal of 150 years of debris that had fallen in such as tree limbs and even whole trees.
That’s the lake covered… then comes the surrounding land… some 19 acres of overgrown forest and 15 ft high brambles. In fact there was only access to the waterside at one place in 5 acres of water and half of the site was not even fenced, a mammoth task in itself as the land is rock hard. Then there’s the facilities to build for the anglers.
At the start I was full of energy and raring to go after spending our first night in our “new” house which resembled a building site, we had concrete floors, no heating, this was not a problem at the time as it was the start of the summer and more importantly no kitchen. My two coleman fishing stoves were employed to do the job of keeping us fed for the next few months until a kitchen could be delivered.
The first job was to clear a path around the lake my new Stihl strimmer was fired up and away I went. I think about 2 weeks passed and I had in place a small path that meandered through the woods and along by the lake. The next decision that had to be made was where to place the swims. Much thought was given to this and I set about clearing 6 pegs off the main path. The chainsaw was now also no stranger to hard work as I cut down the trees that were in the way of the pegs before bringing in the brush cutter. continue reading…
