Having spent the first night of my 48 hour session on RK Leisure’s ‘Kingsmead 1’ sat off the back of the bitterly cold wind I decided to make a move as I hadn’t seen anything to indicate fish were in the area. Having packed everything down I spent the next hour surveying Horton church lake and the “mead”. I was surprised that off the back of the wind in the slack water there were absolutely no signs of fish, on both lakes!

Counter intuitively I made a move straight to the opposite end of K1 where the cold wind was hacking down to. I’d reasoned by looking at the small birds skimming the surface, harvesting the insects rising through the water column, that the fish could be up in the layers down in the strong wind regardless of wind temperature. It could simply be the case that the tow could have simply drifted the upper layer dwelling residents inadvertently to that end of the lake. With nothing visible this reasoning was ‘good enough for me’ and I opted to set up at the polar opposite end to where I’d spent my first night.

The move seemed well justified as a couple of fish rolled within the first hour, during a particularly unsettled period of weather. I decided to position a Horton Rig consisting of a size 4 Special Edition Continental Mugga, 35lb ultra skin with a Mainline ‘New Grange’ hookbait. This was fished with a drop off lead system and attached to Gardner’s fantastic GT-HD main line. Sure enough the combination that has done me so proud already this season paid dividends again and following a spirited fight, an angry common lay in the bottom of my OutReach net.

The shows continued even whilst I was playing the fish and before I’d even had a chance to unhook the common, my other rod hooped over. This one felt different…

A slow plodding fight ensued, the type where you feel like you’re trying to pull the plug out the lake. After a good 7 or 8 minutes passed I finally got my first sight of what was attached to my hook through the crystal clear water. The scale pattern was unmistakable and I knew they belonged to a fish I’d witnessed and dreamt of catching whilst looking off the famous bridge that separates ‘Kingsmead 1’ and the ‘Island Lake’ nearly 3 years ago. My legs turned to jelly and my hands started to shake as it rolled and flanked below the surface and I literally watched it coming towards me upside down! It looked crazy as it pulled out every trick in the book in a bid for freedom, but alas it’s efforts were in vain as I finally engulfed it in the landing net mesh.

A brace of fish from what had been a slow fishing lake was the stuff of dreams, and to see the ‘Mug Sutton’ recovering in the margin was an absolute result; my friend fishing next door also snared 1 in this crazy 15 minutes and we got to do a brace shot of a couple of awesome K1 thirties.

What a result!

Lee Wagner