Gaz Fareham
Rig Slot
ATime and a Place
As a break from the usual step-by-step format I want to discuss a few things this time around. Rigs are one of those things that everyone has their own opinion on. Long? Short? Big hook? Little hook? Leadcore? Pop-up? Bottom bait? I suppose one of the main reasons everyone has their own views is that no two situations are ever the same, conditions differ and so do baiting situations and the successful angler will always tailor his rig to the situation in hand. Sit and watch a good match angler and they are always tweaking their presentation, fettling shotting patterns, the depth or changing hookbaits, anything just to keep the bites coming on that given day. Conditions next time they are on the bank will more than likely be completely different and in turn a slightly different approach might be employed, the accumulation of knowledge gleaned from being out angling in similar conditions providing the basis for their attack.
Carp angling however, is a different animal to match angling, the inherent ‘slowness’ making it far more difficult to assess what is a successful presentation on any particular day. Taking into account the entire spectrum of carp angling you have got the commercial waters where you might be able to land 10 fish in a day where assessing presentation is possible, all the way through to the waters where 1 or 2 carp a year is a result; very different situations that will probably require very different presentations and that is the issue I want to look at here.
Through this column I try to cover a diverse range of presentations that will catch on a variety of venues and for all sizes of fish because I realise that the majority of the readership are probably fishing far more prolific waters than myself. They are all presentations that have been successful for me or my close friends at some point or another but that doesn’t mean I use them week in week out, in fact some I may not have used for years. Because the vast majority of the angling I do is on slow, low stock venues I always try to ‘keep my hand in’ so to speak by having odd sessions on more prolific venues to keep the motivation up when the going is hard. It is here that I play around with my rigs and presentation and because I am getting bites it is easy to tweak things around to see what is working better, a kind of testing ground for my main fishing.
A Bite a Month?
For 95% of the angling I do a bite a week, or even a month, would be bloody good going let alone a bite a chuck so in this type of circumstance it becomes very difficult, in fact almost impossible to assess the effectiveness of your rig. How can you think about experimenting with presentations when it might be a month or two between bites? I don’t think you can really, unless you are in the fortunate position where you can actually watch them feeding and make changes according to what you can see with your own eyes. If you’re going to sit behind a rig blind for weeks at a time you’ve got to know it will do the job when it needs to, it becomes nothing more than a tool you can rely on and one that allows you to almost forget about it and focus on the more vital things like putting it in the right spot. For me, rig choice is almost arbitrary for this type of fishing, carefully considered yes, but not an issue that I need going round in my head when it’s weeks since I’ve even seen a carp.
A Time and a Place
There are a number of considerations that vary greatly between fishing prolific venues and fishing low stock ones. The length of time that your rig may be out in the lake untouched being one very important one. Often I might be leaving a hookbait out for 18 hours or more, in this instance it is imperative that I can be confident that the rig is sat as I intended it. Silver fish, bream and tench may all be having an effect on your rig even though you might not be getting any indication, I need to know they haven’t left it sat crooked, upside down and inside out. A lot of my fishing is done with boilies so I can get away with using a pop-up or if I want to fish a bottom bait I like to include some form of buoyancy in the hookbait, not much but hopefully just enough to re-set the trap if it has been ‘kicked’ around the bottom for a bit. A dainty little bottom bait rig with sliding bits and bobs with a pva stick is pretty useless in this type of scenario, more than likely the crumb will have been wafted away by the silver fish or bream within a short space of time, probably hours before a carp gets anywhere near it. The little ‘sticks’ and bags are great when you are re-casting on a very regular basis but if I know I’m going to be leaving the rig out for a length of time I always opt for something simple and more ‘durable’.
Bream Proof
The southern lake I’ve fished since last winter has been a perfect example of this. The bream are savage in there and if you get on them and aren’t using a suitable presentation (that being even something like a double 15mm) then 10 a night isn’t uncommon. The last thing you want is to be re-chucking every hour so it is imperative that a relatively bream proof rig/hookbait is used. I didn’t always want to use a pop up because I was often fishing over a lot of bait (5-10k of 18millies). A single 18 was still nailing too many bream for my liking so I ended up using a big 25-30mm/16mm snowman set up with a good length hair which worked a treat, the buoyant top bait helping to ensure it would always be sat right too as even though I wasn’t hooking the bream on the rig, I’ve no doubt they were on the spots most of the time. Crude maybe, but superbly effective for that situation. A simple stringer of 18mm baits hopefully staying there long enough to provide a little bit of concentrated attraction around the hookbait, a pva bag of pellet, chops or crumb would just be demolished in minutes. Although it’s handy to know what’s happening on your area by catching an odd bream, I’ve no doubt that continual activity caused by re-casting can only be detrimental to your chances of a carp, it certainly can’t be a good thing.
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Coot Proof
The second instance that springs to mind is on the same venue where, without going into too many details, I’ve been fishing a spot where for a variety of reasons it is often impossible to re-position a rig during the day, which is prime time during the winter for the area. The bird activity over the area is horrendous and I am getting coot and tuftie pick-ups all day, being unable to re-position the bait leaves a dilemma because with a standard rig you’ve no idea how it’s going to be sat once they’ve dropped it, it might be sat ok…but it just as easily might be sat in a twisted mess. The answer has simply been to fish a Chod rig down there with a rock hard corkballed pop-up as a single. The rig is about as ‘bullet proof’ as you can get and I know it will always re-set itself and be sat right, regardless of how much it has been mucked around with. With a rig on the spot for 4 days I know I realistically may only get once chance at best, the baits were coming back in the evening with beak marks all over them but the link still had it’s nice little curve in it and you know it had been sat right. It is just about confidence and consistency that’s all.
