Changing spots to earn my stripes


MILL FARM FISHERY, BURY, NEAR PULBOROUGH, WEST SUSSEX.


Mill Farm Fishery is best known for its record silver bream, but today I’m on the Hammer Pond match lake which has been producing some good bags of specimen sized perch in matches. It only opened in 2002 and has already produced perch to over 4 lb, with plenty of back-up two and three-pounders. It has grown up quite nicely and there are plenty of overhanging trees, reed-beds and an island.


venues where you’d expect to find them. Specimens in excess of 4 lb were always


P


very rare, but now they can be found in lots of different waters, and perch have made a real comeback after the disease in the 70s which wiped huge numbers of them out. Up until the last decade or so, if you wanted to


catch a big perch you tended to have to target some of the larger waters, such as the Tring complex. But all that changed when some of our rivers


became infested with crayfish, which perch love to eat. The Great Ouse started producing fish to over 5 lb with lots of back-up ones over 4 lb. The biggest change, though, has been in the


number of commercial fisheries that we have all over the country. There were a few smaller waters around that


were stuffed full of silver fish and did produce the odd big perch, but nothing like we have today. It now seems that virtually any over-stocked


hole in the ground is capable of doing a stripy in excess of 4 lb, especially as they very rarely have any others predators – pike, zander or cats – to compete with for the abundant food that is available in the form of small fish. It has also become noticeable recently that


in these waters perch are making use of other easier available food sources rather than chasing fish, and you hear of waters where the going perch bait is sweetcorn or luncheon meat. Even where they still retain their usual


tastes, you’ll often find that a prawn or mussel will easily outscore more traditional baits like lobworm, which are susceptible to getting ripped to pieces by the hordes of F1s, carp, roach and bream that these lakes usually contain. For me the place I fish is fairly important, and


no matter what size the fish I won’t sit on a water that literally is a muddy whole in the ground


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ERCH fishing has changed a lot in recent years, both in terms of the size of fish and


GARY’S AIM


A few perch would be a nice start and you always


hope you might get really lucky and hook a four-pounder.


CONDITIONS Overcast with low light levels, but it has been colder than of late for a few days before my session.


stuffed with fish and surrounded by an angler every ten yards. Shooting fish in a barrel whilst stood in a muddy field springs to mind! There are plenty of commercial fisheries,


though, that are actually very pleasant places to fish, and some are especially nice – White Acres for instance earlier this season gave me a really pleasant surprise and was different to what I expected. Another one that springs to mind is Mill Farm


Fishery, in West Sussex, which is surrounded by mature trees and the lakes are bordered by reed-beds, and even the match lake has plenty of overhanging trees and other features, despite not being dug that many years ago. It is a water that I have fished a few times


before, targeting Mill Lake for the silver bream which have grown to British record size in the past. But whilst down there, the bailiff, Adrian, had mentioned the big perch that all three lakes on the complex had been producing. There had been perch caught to over 5 lb from the specimen lake and all three had a history of ‘fours’, which really made my ears prick up. But like many interesting pieces of


information that you hear, I soon forgot about the perch as I was busy fishing for other species through the summer. Mill Farm was brought to my attention again


recently by a friend who I regularly fish with, Mike Davidson, who had another friend who’d had a day down there and done very well, catching a good number of perch to over 3 lb, with these all coming from the match lake. We decided it sounded too good to ignore and planned to spend a day there. My main attack was going to be prawns, although I had a few lobworms with me as well and maggots for loose feed, so I decided to get a couple of packets of the cheapest frozen prawns I could find, and liquidise them into something resembling a pate consistency. This would be ideal for fishing in the feeder


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