Lee Collings went from despair to triumph as an unfortunate encounter with a misguided swan left his gear in a bit of a state, but it all ended happily with this stunning common. Excellent angling from Lee who’s change of tactics when it called for it paid off in style.
“I returned early from a nightmare session on Brook Lake after a kamikaze swan decided to attack some other swans feeding in front of my swim, but got its emergency landing completely wrong and decided to land on my set up! It smashed my rods and broke the thread off my bank stick which submerged my alarms in 4 foot of water. So as you can imagine the swim was trashed and I had to play ‘hook a duck’ to try and fish my alarms off the lake bed and with my alarms making funny noises I had to cut the session short.
So after licking my wounds and thinking of what had just happened and still in shock I decided I needed to get out again.
After putting the delkims in the airing cupboard to dry out I borrowed my dad’s alarms and set off again to my tricky midland venue. The lake has been fishing very hard recently as being a deep lake it has only just starting to wake up and the fish are all still leeched up.
To make matters worse when I arrived I found the fish feeding hard on a fly hatch. I managed to get on them and tried zigs at every depth possible – I was pulling my hair out as I couldn’t buy a bite and was thinking my bad luck was still haunting me then all a sudden a change in the weather and it poured down with rain for the next 4 hours which meant the fish stopped feeding on the hatch but were still showing over the same sort of area.
As it was late afternoon I flicked out a rig utilizing ESP components clipped up at the same range as I had been fishing and a couple of hours later my rod ripped off. As a tense battle ensued I was more than happy after a frustrating day and a stunning common of 33lb 5oz was sat in my net.
The fish is only the 5th from the venue this year and one of my target fish so I was over the moon as a bit of Karma for what happened at the start of the week!”