The lengths we go to

NASH KNOWHOW

The Lengths We Go To

LENGTHS WE GO TO...

THE

By Steve Briggs

Still casting out the same short links as everybody else on your venue? Once you go short there’s nowhere else to go… or is there? Seasoned big carp ace Steve Briggs examines the merits of short versus long.

For many carp anglers rigs and rig theory become almost an obsession and I’m not always sure if this very detailed focus on rigs actually helps to catch more carp in the long run or not.

My view is slightly different, and when I tie a rig up I always say that it should be able to land the biggest fish in the lake should I hook it, rather than tying one to try and get me an extra bite or two.

Over the years I’ve certainly simplified my approach, which I feel has helped me a great deal in becoming more consistent. I don’t use Chod Rigs and I’ve never even tied a Ronny Rig because I simply don’t feel they would help me to catch more. But one thing I absolutely believe in the importance of is the length of the hooklink.

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NASH KNOWHOW

The Lengths We Go To

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Same Old, Same Old… For bottom fishing we generally use a hook length of 6 to 10 inches which for the vast majority of the time is what we consider is the optimum length. Is it really the optimum length or something we just do without giving it much thought? I bet if you walk around most lakes in the next few days nearly everyone fishing on the bottom will be using those similar lengths. If anglers do change anything then they always tend to go shorter, feeling that it will hook the fish faster before they can get away with it.

I can see the thought process behind that but I also think that it is an assumption rather like most people will use a bright bait or an overflavoured one as they imagine it must be more attractive to the fish. The same goes for shorter hook links, logic would say they must tip the odds in your favour.

Bagging Up I do have thoughts and also experiences using shorter rigs and of course have their place at the right times. One time they really showed their worth me was during the first World Carp Cup that I ever fished over in France at Fishabil. Although my use of PVA bags had been fairly limited up until that point, on a trial session a few weeks earlier I’d found the fish responded very well to the PVA bag and pellet approach. You don’t see it used so much these days as more people like to use small mesh bags with more normal rigs but in the right situation the solid PVA bag and pellets can be devastating – so much so that it went a long way to winning that competition. I was fishing amongst quite a few tree stumps and although it wasn’t essential, it did help to keep everything inside the bag when casting so that I could be sure that the bait was presented well on the bottom. With everything having to be squeezed in to a small bag it just doesn’t lend itself to the use of a long hook length and most people I know who have used solid PVA bags a lot over the years have also used short rigs. When I say short, I mean 3-4 inches.

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The hook bait would be the first thing placed in the bottom corner of the bag and the point of the hook would just be nicked in to the side of the PVA to hold it in place. Then a few pellets would be added before the lead, which for me tended to be a smallish inline lead, would go in the other corner, this was so the bulk of the weight would be at the bottom of the bag when casting. Then the remainder of the bag would be filled with pellets and possibly broken boilies before being sealed or tied at the top. The hook link with a solid bag is invariably some sort of soft braid.

Besides the practicality of being pushed in to a small bag, short hook lengths work so well with this method because once the bag dissolves then the patch of bait it leaves is very tightly grouped on the bottom.

When the fish came in and fed they were feeding tight to that one spot as opposed to moving around picking up larger individual food items.

But something else to consider is that was the fish I was catching were mostly on the smaller side, either doubles or low 20s – I think the biggest we caught over the five days was around 28lb and that came to a different set up. I am sure that short hook lengths are far more effective when fishing for smaller fish and that obviously has something to do with the way different sized fish feed and pick up their food.

I will admit that my experiences of actually watching what happens with big fish and small fish over different rigs is very limited and is more based on what happens at the rod end while fishing – which to me probably makes it more relevant even if it sounds less exciting.

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1. Rainbow Lake taught me some valuable lessons on rig lenths 2 Small mesh bags do help to present the bait over weed 3. Short hook lengths and PVA bags helped me to win the first World Carp Cup I entered 4. I found short hook lengths far more successful for smaller fish but they came in to their own for PVA bag fishing 5. I repeatedly lose fish on chod rigs

Short Link Loser I’m not convinced about short links with big fish. I did try short hook lengths for a while at Rainbow Lake in France.

That one lake probably sees more pressure than any other water I know as every swim is booked for virtually every day of the year and those fish have had everything thrown their way at one time or another. For a while I thought like many others had before me that if the fish were riggy then it stood to reason that a shorter hook length might be the way forward.

I did give them a reasonable trial but my findings were that shorter rigs didn’t help at all. What started to happen with short rigs was that I would receive several dropped takes and sharp pulls that came to nothing and many of the fish that I did land were only just hooked in the edge of the lips. It was quite clear that however cautious the fish were, going shorter didn’t actually give me any advantage. My findings made me keen to experiment more with long rigs – more of which later.

We can’t discuss short rigs without a mention of Chods. Now don’t get me wrong I know that Chod Rigs have caught a whole lot of fish for a whole lot of people, but I can never work out how. The problem with Chod Rigs isn’t that they don’t work, as I gave them the benefit of the doubt for quite some time and I did receive plenty of takes on them, but the main problem was that most of them fell off! I can only tell this from my side as I’ve heard all of the arguments in their favour, but believe me I tried all of the methods that other people use and advised me on but at the end of the day probably 80% of the fish that I hooked on Chod Rigs fell off and that wasn’t something that I could continue with so I’ve never used them again to this day.

were lost by two different people either side of me and they were all hook pulls when using Chod Rigs. I told them of my history with that rig and they changed over to something else and then never lost another fish between them. More important is that I really don’t believe that I’ve caught any less fish by not using Chod Rigs or any other short rig so I just don’t think about them anymore.

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I just didn’t get on with them and it’s not just me. On a recent trip to Poland I was fishing alongside a few friends in the same area and we were all catching steadily every day. I stuck with my basic go to rigs and landed all of the 20 odd fish that I hooked. Only a couple of fish

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NASH KNOWHOW

The Lengths We Go To

Long and Slow Size of carp you are fishing for isn’t the only factor that makes longer hook lengths the better option. Fishing amongst weed they are often the only option. The first time I can recall using much longer rigs for that reason was way back in the mid 1980s at Darenth Tip Lake in Kent. One year the lake was overrun with weed and you could climb any of the trees and look for clear spots but there simply weren’t any. If you wanted to fish then you had to cast in to the weed, but some areas were a little less dense than others and to try and give myself the best chance of

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presenting a bait I used a much longer hook length with a critically balanced bait that would hopefully just come to rest on the weed rather than being pulled down into it. It worked okay and I caught plenty of fish on that long rig.

It gave me the confidence to use that same type of rig on many other weedy waters. Colnbrook West was a cracking little lake quite local to me, which held a really good stock of fish. The problem was that it had deeper channels that were clear but most of the shallower plateaus and humps where the fish wanted to feed were covered in that

horrible dark brown silk weed. The weed would engulf any rig if you tried to drag back after casting, so you had to just let the rig drop and leave it there.

Some areas of the weed were thicker than others and so you could never be quite sure what you were fishing over.

By then the foam nuggets were very popular and so too was fishing with small mesh bags of pellets that could help mask the hook point on the drop. I caught loads of fish from there on those long rigs and they really worked a treat and yet I never saw anyone else using anything like it.

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6. My biggest Colnbrook West common caught on a long rig adapted to fish over weed 7. Looking for signs one cold February morning on the tricky Copse Lake 8. I went back to the long rig on the Copse Lake when the fish refused to move from the weed 9. Fishing a long hook length was my way of dealing with this stuff 10. It worked! A Copse Lake cracker on a 2ft hook length

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Weed Winner I guess today the first choice for thousands of carpers would be the Chod Rig, but they just aren’t in my armoury. Every now and then I’m in a tricky situation though where a long rig gets me out of trouble and it’s a trick I always keep up my sleeve.

Early in the year I had a chance to fish Kevin’s Copse Lake in Essex. Most people who’ve fished there in recent years will tell you how tricky it is and it’s like many small waters, from the outside they look easy enough until that first rig gets cast out and then the fish are on guard and often shut up shop. Unfortunately the only time I could get on was for a couple of nights in February and there hadn’t been a fish caught for a couple of months. Even through the cold months the lake stayed incredibly weedy with it almost growing to the surface still in some places. There were some clear spots although far from easy to find, but for the first night I did manage to get all rods presented on reasonably clear spots. The big problem was that none of those spots were anywhere near the carp! Sitting out with a cup of tea in the early morning I was awake enough to see a few shows and they were all in one area of the small lake. In fact they were all around one weedy little corner opposite where I was set up. I had a

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couple of casts near to them but it was obvious that they wanted to be where the thickest of the weed was, maybe it was to hide away from me although I think it was more that they just felt comfortable and possibly warmer in amongst the weed. When I crept around to the corner for a closer look I couldn’t see the fish but what I could see were areas of the weed where it was just a bit thinner and once I’d marked where those spots were I came up with the plan of dropping some baits in with my longer hooklengths and very slow sinking baits. I used two feet of 20lb Combilink with the coating all stripped off to make it as flexible as possible. A size 7 Fang Twister was knotless knotted with a shortish hair and a little 15mm Key Cray snowman with the baits trimmed until it all just sank very slowly. To cut a long story short the next morning one of the rods was away and after a spirited battle I had my first and only Copse Lake carp on the bank, a stunning darklooking common, not the biggest carp I’ve ever caught but one that gave me immense pleasure and I went home a very happy man!

times my presentations are fairly basic and straight-forward but everything is done for a reason and I still use rigs and presentations that I feel will catch me fish at any given time. Sometimes the situation dictates that I need to think slightly differently or outside of the box to get a result, and there’s a lot of mileage in going longer rather than going shorter - something that almost everyone seems to have forgotten along the way.

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I think I would have struggled to catch on any other rig on that occasion and it was tailoring the rig to suit the situation that had earned me that fish. Most of the

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