The Lake: sails & eels!

I daresay that I might have been the first (and last!) person to circumnavigate the lake under full sail! This photograph and the one below must have been taken after my father undertook to dredge the accummulated silt in August 1949.

The following article from The Southern Daily Echo from the time is titled 'The Mystery of Warnford's Big Pond'. The mystery in question being the total absence of eels when not a dozen years before, the lake had yielded "enough eels for the whole locality to live on them for a week".

The photographs below show the giant excavators used for the job and the bulldozer that was used to clear those areas that were out of range of the excavators' 50 foot jibs.

The following picture will have been taken some forty years later and shows weed-cutting in operation upstream of the lake.