ANGLER BLINDED BY FLOAT SNAGGED HOOK JERKS FREE

ANGLER Guy Manton was left blinded when he tugged on what he thought was a giant catch – and his float tore free of weeds and hit him in the eye “like a speeding bullet”.

Dad-of-five Guy thought he was landing a whopper at the end of a three-day fishing festival.

But his hook, with a five gram weighted float, had snagged on a lily pad.

Guy, 55, said: “I pulled and the float’s come straight back across the lake and smashed my eye.

“At first it was just a stinging feeling – I was stunned, more than acute pain. I wasn’t rolling around in agony. I actually walked round to the guys either side of me to see if I could continue.

“But when the sight came back in my right eye I looked into my hand and it was essentially the contents of my left eyeball.

“I thought, ‘Yes, this is a bit worse than I first thought’.”

Retired engineer Guy, of Gillingham, Dorset, calmly phoned his wife, then waited for an ambulance after the freak accident at Todber Manor fishery, close to his home.

He was taken to hospital in Salisbury, then transferred to a specialist unit at Southampton – where surgeons stitched the tissue back together in “eyeball reconstruction”.

But despite the intricate three-hour operation, medics were unable to save his sight. Guy said: “It literally smashed my eye to bits – I’ll never see out of it again.” Doctors told him the float had slammed into his eye “with the force of a shotgun pellet”, rupturing the delicate membranes and forcing the lens through his retina into his optic nerve.

Guy added: “It’s just one of those things. I’d only just got back into fishing after a five- year break. I just have to crack on – but it’s not as easy as I first thought it was going to be.”

He had recently started working part-time at his son’s engineering firm after retiring two years ago.

Guy’s wife of five years, Samantha, 43, said: “He just called and said, ‘I’ve lost my eye’.

“He’s still in so much pain, they’re not sure if he’s going to actually have his eye removed and have a false eye.”