When my Monday morning gardening customer cancelled at short notice, I was delighted to get a bonus 3-hours fishing in. With no maggots to fish the Lamborne or Hambridge, I pulled out some mackerel I had in the freezer from last winter, grabbed a couple of heavy rods and made for Dixons. Warm for November, dank and with light rain, it seemed perfect and I cast out a leger 20 yards to my left, and a bung a similar distance to my right. 

After about half an hour, the buzzer sounded a couple of times and I struck early to avoid deep hooking as they say. Fish on, it made for the far bank, but I managed to turn it whereupon it turned right and powered at some pace to the snags the other side of where my bung was floating. I've spent all day trying to work out what happened next to no avail...

Inevitably the bung started to drag as the lines inevitably crossed and the pike reached the snags a few yards further on where it jammed solid. Unable to pull the fish out, I put the rod down to allow it to swim off when it thought the coast was clear, and in the meantime, I started winding in the bung to at least get it out of the way. But that line immediately met with the resistance of a swimming fish, just as the leger rod with the snagged fish on, now on the ground next to me, started bouncing. Did I now have a pike on both lines? I had to play the fish on the bung line and netted it, along with a tangle of hooks and wire traces about a foot up the wire from the fish's nose. On quick inspection this tangle was made up of both of my rigs - so none of my hooks were in the fish! But instead, there was a large, alien swivel in the birds nest attached to some previous angler's wire which was connected to pike through the edge of its gill plate. I turned the fish on its back to find the hooks from this mystery rig swallowed beyond sight through the gill rakers. Not wanting to damage them, I snipped the wire trace as far down as I could and released it. I was left to disentangle my two traces and cast both rods out again. 

I've absolutely no idea what happened. All I can say is that the initial fight seemed to be from a fish much bigger than the 8lb 12oz pike I landed. Had I lost this one, but implausibly snagged another? Who knows - but it still counts! The pike I did land was in perfect condition despite the swallowed tackle. In the remaining couple of hours, I missed two more runs (possibly striking too early, but I hate the prospect of deep hooking) and landed a 3lb 15 jack.