'Egg Box' Incubation Experiment
A message from the Chairman - Gerry Allcock
The club members, I hope, will be interested in the Egg Box experiment, which has been going for five years, on the River Churnet, at Oakamoor, and on the still waters that I rent, at Greendale, Oakamoor.
In December 2000, a group of us met at Ashbourne, and had a discussion about the Churnet, and the still water pools that I had rented since 1989. In 1993/4 I had been successful in breeding Rainbow trout in my top pool, which was spring fed, and had a 30 metre gravel stream in which 
the trout could spawn. After 1994 I had no success in breeding trout, until member Tim Jacklin suggested that we could experiment with the '"Trout Jacuzzi" as the egg box was called, on the Wild Trout Trust web site.
Tim explained that the boxes were ideal for rivers like the Churnet, which were likely to get silted up, especially in winter. Tony Bridgett, and members of our club, got together and by mid December 2000, we had egg boxes installed at the outflow of the Eastwall pond, on the Churnet, and In the Greendale spring fed stream.
For the first two years we got the eyed Brown trout eggs from a trout farm north of Bakewell, and we have each year introduced about 14,000 trout fry into the river at very little cost to the club.
In 2004 we started to use a purpose built box, which we designed ourselves. It is a syphonic system with brush and foam filters, through which the water flows before flowing upwards over the eyed eggs as they use up the egg sack. The box is in darkness but after the trout lose the egg sack, they swim up through the large lumps of gravel, looking for the only light source which is where the water exits the box through 4 pipes
Having left the box for the rivers and pools, the fry are 20% bigger than fish farm trout, due to them having a stress free start to life. In 2003 and 2004 we managed to introduce 40000 eggs into the boxes from the upper Lathkill, we were delighted with this introduction, as these trout, are truly wild trout.
Izaak Walton and Charles cotton fished for the ancestors of these delightful fish on the Upper Lathkill above Alport Mill, near Youlgreave, Derbyshire. Please handle them with wet hands, photograph if you must and return them to the River, then think how lucky you are that Warren Slaney, and Lord Edward Manners, our patron of the HADDON ESTATE, were kind enough to supply the eggs to our Association.
