Dear Spug

I took up carping just over a year ago and there is so much to learn, you can learn something new every day. During this time I’ve read a number of carp magazines, and I find that Crafty explains things in depth but simply and easy to understand, especially with the use of photos and information from the top anglers. I have two questions, which I hope you will be able to answer:

1. On difficult waters where carp are hard to catch, do you think that taking some of the lake water home to soak your boilies before you next fish there is a good idea? Then, when you fish the pool next time the carp won’t be as cautious and think that the boilies have been in the water some time.

2. Can you explain please to me why and when to use different hooklengths?

Thanks,
Dean Clayton, Walsall

Hi Dean, and thanks for the questions. I will try to answer both of them to the best of my ability.

1) Firstly, the issue of taking home water from the lake in order to soak your boilies – i.e. to produce washed out baits – can, at times, offer an advantage, and there have certainly been times when anglers on certain lakes (including the harder, more pressured ones) have benefited from having done so. We have all fished a session where we have left out a bait for a whole weekend and then just as we are packing up, one of the rods has ripped off and at that point the bait on the end will certainly be more washed out than when we cast it out, but is this purely because of the amount of time the bait has been out and hence been stumbled across, or because the bait and freebies have soaked in a bit of water? Personally I think it can be one or the other, or even both, but either way, if you go down to your local lake with soaked hookbaits and try them, then quite simply it’s something different from the norm, so yes, it’s definitely worth trying it out on one rod, and if that rod out-fishes your other rod with a normal bait on, then you have found yourself a little edge, which may well help you to put more fish on the bank.

2) Rig lengths – now there’s an issue! This is a massive subject and can be quite confusing, and for every rule/answer I come up with, there will have been fish caught in the totally opposite manner, so I will quickly give you a rough outline of how I fish.

When fishing in weed or silt I tend to use a slightly longer hooklink of, say, up to 14ins, and in conjunction with this I also tend to use a lighter lead of up to 2oz and often use either a pop-up or a large chunk of dissolvable foam on a bottom bait in order to let the bait settle down slowly.

On harder bottom lakebeds, such as gravel, I tend to use a heavier lead of up to 4oz (depending on the distance I am fishing) and hooklinks of about 9ins, usually with a bottom bait, although if I feel the fish are managing to eject the bait from their mouths without getting pricked by the hook, I will gradually shorten the hooklength down to as far as 3-4ins.

I have found that trial and error is the best way forward regarding the lengths of hooklinks, and the things I have mentioned above are only just rough outlines and hopefully a starting point for you. There have been times when I have caught in thick silt on a short hooklink, or on a longer hooklink on hard lakebeds. It appears to me that different methods work on different lakes, so I am adaptable on each lake until I find the best way to fish it, and then it will be the same rig on all rods.
I hope this helps, and be lucky.

Spug