The dreaded Brown Trout incident

I write this small article in the hopes my fishing buddy Derek will finally shut up about the "day I lost him that big trout"

We had been fishing at a small private pond and we had a decent day with some nice Roach and a load of small Carp - in fact it began to get too easy. Quite near to the pond is a small river - well more a brook in reality. Give yourself a good run-up and you could probably leap across it.

We drove down the farm track to a small bridge and we could see a shoal of what appeared to be small roach - about five or six inches long. We just set up a rod kitted up with a small waggler and line of about 2lbs and fished straight through with no hook length. We fished straight off the bridge and just lifted them up (yes I know, a very clever thing to do !) - then out of nowhere this Brown Trout of about 2lbs shot out, flying from underneath the bridge like a Polaris Missile and took the double maggots in one gulp. You can imagine the pandemonium.

I leapt down the side of the bridge to the waterside and Derek passed me the rod. I was just about managing to control the lunatic thing knowing full well that 2lbs line was nowhere near enough. Derek climbed down beside me, and the very split-second I handed him the rod (in fact his hand had just touched the rod butt) - the Trout made a crazy zig zag like something demented and PING ! - it was off.

There was a sickly silence for all of about 10 seconds before we instantly tried to blame each other. Derek is convinced I lost the damn fish. That was about 6 months ago and I still haven't heard the last of it, so Derek my old mate - GET A LIFE