Jon, it was only a few years after this that the lake Lezay's owner's son-in-law passed his PADI diving examinations. He decided to have a look at the lake bed and they found, to their horror, that the lake bed had hundreds of what looked like fence posts sticking up out of the bottom. They immediatly closed the lake for fishing and subsequently drained it and moved all the stock to another of their lakes. It was something of a miracle that they didn't lose much of their stock to tethering. The lakes owner, Steve, knew what went in and when they drained the lake they got most of it back out again, inc. the cats and the previously mentioned Merv.
When my brother took the sturgeon he hooked it in over 15ft of water, which probably acounts for the acrobatics. It fell to a lump of squid within five minutes of being cast out for the evening session. From memory it took about 2.5 hours for him to land the fish and he was in and out of the boat four or five times.
As for my four hours, I'm not even sure it was the sturgeon; it was probably more likely one of the larger resident cats. I too was in and out of the boat several times and probably lost it on account of it being round a fellow angler's line (one from my group, no less, who point blank refused to bring in his line, even when I warned him that the fish was heading straight through his swim). After twenty minutes or so faffing around untangling rods and lines the fish had every chance to plot up somewhere and just sit it out. After another hour and half sitting directly above it, heavy and hoeing, I eventually got everything back minus the hook. I clipped up my rods my rods and retired to the bivvy for the night, shattered and gutted.
