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At Cob House Fish Farm, we are fast gaining a reputation for producing some of the best looking English Bred Carp in the country. We achieve this by careful selection of broodstock and by annually adding to our broodstock 'bank' from our own grown-on all-English fish. We select for body shape, scale pattern and tail size to produce the attractive, hard-fighting stock fish for which we have become so well known. We produce a mix of Mirror and Common Carp and our commons are just as popular as the Mirrors. All our parent Carp are kept on site where we can monitor their development and health status. Brood fish are fed specialist pellets to ensure the development of high quality eggs and milt.

We make no exorbitant claims about growth rates of our English Bred Carp. However, many of our Carp reach 8 to 10 inches in their first summer and achieve a weight of 8 to 9 ounces - that is 4 to 5 five times longer and almost 40 times heavier than when they were stocked! Not bad for just under six months of growth. We always have a number of fish that exceed 10 inches in their first summer and some reach between 1lb and 2lbs plus (record so far: 3 lbs).  All these Carp are one summer fish. We occasionally grow fish to order and have seen two-summer fish reach 4½ pounds and three-summer fish over 10 lbs.

Our Carp have tested negative for SVC and KHV - testament to the fact that we use our own resident English Carp brood stock.

A note about growth rate and scale patterns. According to genetic studies and our own experience, Common Carp and ‘scattered Mirrors’ (including fully-scaled mirrors) always grow faster than leather and Linear Carp. 'Fast growing' strains of Leather Carp, which are selectively bred in Europe to grow quickly to table size, often decrease greatly in their rate of growth during their second and third years. These fish are imported into Britain by some suppliers and often sold as British fish.

Always buy British Carp from a specialist stock fish breeding farm like Cob House Fisheries.

All our broodstock parent fish are kept on site to avoid the introduction of disease from external sources. This also enables us to maintain and monitor the health status of our breeders throughout the year to ensure the production of high quality sexual gametes (eggs and milt).

 

Each year, we select some of our fastest growing one or two summer stock fish to continue growing on as future broodstock. We are now at a point where all the fish we use for breeding are our own grown on fish, so we are 100% certain of their origin and can be confident that they will produce the high quality offspring that our customers require.

 

As we are now producing stock fish from our own grown-on home bred brood fish, we consider our fish to be the ‘COB HOUSE STRAIN’. And, if big fish mecca Bluebell Lakes buys stock fish from nowhere else, they must be good fish !!

 

Take a look at the pictures here. These are fish that have rapidly grown too large to be used for our breeding purposes…. and the oldest is only 5 summers old!!

 

Take a look at the body shape, scale patterns and the large tails. These are the attributes that we strive to duplicate in our stock fish to give our customers beautiful looking, hard fighting Carp that anglers can really appreciate catching.

 

The tail ‘wrist’ (caudal peduncle) is also important — the muscle in the long tail wrist in our fish gives the thrust to the tail fin which, in our fish, is as deep as the body when fully extended.

 

We avoid the round bodied, scaleless, small-tailed carp that some dealers supply, as customers have told us anglers complain that they are ‘boring’ and don’t have ‘much fight’!! And as fishery managers, we have to give the anglers what they want!

 

So is there any need to import carp into Britain? At Cob House Fisheries, we think not. British breeders can produce quality, fast growing, good looking carp in the numbers required to satisfy demand, so insist on British Carp from genuine British breeders…..

 

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Coarse Fish Farm And Coarse Fishery

Specialist breeders of quality English coarse fish

5 summers old and 20lb exactly!