Korda ace beats his personal best three times in same session!

Korda backed rod, Jonathan Brown  has enjoyed a very productive session on Lake Pelagicavo over in Bosnia & Herzegovina, where he’s been living for the past 14 years, working for NATO.

He explained: “Everyone we spoke to commented on how difficult the lake was to fish during the week, almost as if the fish knew when not to feed.

My fishing partner, Muhamed Dzafo had reserved swim five, an area I hadn’t fished before. We had fished swims eight and 10 two weekends before and hadn’t managed to catch, so anticipation wasn’t high but we were hoping the stories of the venue fishing hard during the week would prove unfounded.

We arrived around 2pm on the Sunday and spent a few hours setting up. Muhamed used his marker rod to search the lakebed for a good area to fish. I found a nice area between swims four and five with depths of two to two and half metres approximately 35 to 40 metres from the bank. Muhamed found a similar depth but at a greater distance of 100 to 110 metres from swim five towards swim 29. As always we spent a good amount of time discussing what tactics we would use on the session. Weather conditions were almost perfect, cloud cover with sunny intervals during the day with rain at night.

The water temperature was 17°C at the start, dropping to 14°C by the end of our trip. We started with 20 spods each followed up with around half a kilo of boilies spread over the general area. During the day, we put an additional 10 spods each on the spots every two hours plus a few handfuls of boilies spread around. In total 50kg particles and 10kg boilies were divided between the two swims was used. This may sound like a lot of bait but this lake has a large head of fish with most of the fish being over 25lb.

During the three days of fishing we had 22 bites, landing 19 beauties. The smallest carp caught being 30lb 8oz with three captures beating my previous PB of 48lb. The top five fish being over 40lb making this the most incredible weeks fishing we have ever had. On the last evening I lost what felt like another good fish. The hook pulled during the fight due to the fact I was being a little too hasty with it. I was already on cloud nine having broken PB twice so I took the loss in my stride.

The next morning I began packing up when I was alerted to the sound from my bite alarm slowly indicating a backdrop. Lifting the rod into the air the fish kitted very fast to the left alluding to this being a smaller fish. Within 15 minutes I had the fish some 10 meters from the net when I saw the fish roll on the surface. Panic set in straight away, I called for assistance from Muhamed. The sheer size of the scales on the fish told me I had something special attached.

Having lost a fish the evening before I immediately reset the clutch to allow the fish to run if she wanted to. It took maybe another five minutes before we had her in the landing net. Tipping the scales at 61lb plus I just couldn’t believe my eyes. I honestly had a numb feeling all over.

The rig that fouled these carp was made from 30lb N-Trap and a size-4 Kurv Shank. I keep my rigs as simple as possible using just a small piece of silicon tubing and shrink tube on the hook to aid hooking. I used this in conjunction with an inline lead and Dark Matter tubing to help pin everything to the lake bed.

Hook baits incorporated two 16mm boilies from Element Baits. A mixture of Fruity Mix, Black Fish and two new baits we’re currently testing. We have had some great success on this venue but they all pale in comparison to this exciting trip. Its not often you manage to break your PB 3 times in one session!"