If a moat come to be laid dry, as will be necessary sometimes to keep it from turning all to mud, after you have by a sluice or cut, drained the water as low as you can, make dams with boards and clay, and ram them to be water-tight; so you may toss the water out of one division to another, and take out the fish in good order; but if you dry all together, you will not be able to secure all; besides, having one division full of water, you can relieve the fry and eels by letting it upon them; which else, for want of a fresh to let in upon them, will be lost. So when one division is fished, that is relieved by tossing the water out of the next. And this course is not amiss, though you intend to throw out the mud; for the saving the fish while you are taking them out, quits the charge of making the stanks.
Of other auxiliary Waters.
You must have other waters besides stews, to assist in the disposition of the fish; for laying a pond in that great order dry, as I propose, once in every year, there will be a great quantity of fish to be disposed; so that you must have a sufficient quantity of waters to receive when you abound, and to recruit when you want. The stews will carry sixty, seventy, or eighty carps apiece, supposing you spend continually out of them; so other waters will receive their proportion, by sending this way and that the stock of fish, you will preserve all, and know where to find them again.
These bye-ponds will be dispersed about your estate, where perhaps your predecessors thought fit to make them, for the convenience of their pastures, or you may make them as you can best, with respect to charge and other advantages, observing always in a ground to take that part for your pond, to which the waters are most apt to settle. In some places, but very few, the waters stand best upon the hills, and the valleys, when sandy, will not hold well. The nature of the ground is to be regarded.
Some ponds of good depth, of about five or six rods square, should be assigned to maintain pikes, which, when great, ought to be kept by themselves; for in a few years they will devour other fish, and greatly surprise you in the destruction they will make. But I shall speak more of this when I come to the stocking of waters.
I do much approve of cleansing and carting out the mud of small standing waters once in seven or eight years, and so letting them lie dry one summer, if you can spare the water; which, from moats, and pasture-waters, can scarce be done, without great inconvenience. These matters exercise the invention of a good œconomist, who will endeavour to prevent damage, as well as save time, and turn even his pleasures to profit.
One thing I advertise here, which is, not to let carps continue in a small standing water above two summers and one winter; for so you run a much less hazard from frost, than otherwise you will do; besides, the fish will grow much more upon transplanting, than by continuing in the same water, and more in the great, than in the small waters: but of these things more afterwards.