Danny Fairbrass is founder and Managing Director of Korda. He started making leads in his kitchen 24 years ago. He first sold the leads out of two little black buckets, walking round Walthamstow Reservoirs in the early 1990s. It all changed when he took his 2oz and 3oz zip style leads to a couple of local tackle shops; there was clearly a demand for high quality leads and for different shapes and sizes, so Danny set about commissioning his own moulds and Korda was born.
Danny's carp fishing started on the club lakes in Essex, being a young lad meant he could only fish waters he could get to by bus or by bike. He caught his first double aged fifteen, a 10lb 4oz common from The Piggeries in Hadleigh, near his mum’s house. It took him six more years of fishing every weekend to catch his first twenty, a 21lb 14oz common from The Little Grange, also in Essex.
That was over 25 years ago. In the meantime his target fish have got heavier and so has he! Nowadays, Danny fishes a mixture of day-ticket waters like Walthamstow and Linear and zero-publicity syndicates. He chooses venues based on the stock and the lake itself. He has gone through the 'big is best' part of his carp fishing and now prefers somewhere with a nice atmosphere and affable members, rather than the dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day circuit water.
He also fishes abroad on a regular basis, starting in Holland more than 20 years ago, moving onto Belgium and then France. His favourite water of all time is Lac Du Der Chantecoq, a 16,000-acre reservoir in the Champagne region.