gnorty

At the risk of giving egg-sucking lessons - this can be avoided by looping the line in the direction away from the join. Unless you mean the eye has burrs inside, which really is unforgivable!

weird. fished in the week with some new 20mm pop-ups (not new boilies, but new to me!) I wanted to balance them, and the thing that made it sink just right was a SSG shot. I used it under the boilie on the hair, like an inverted snowman, but still - nice to know I am one of the front runners on the latest trends Seriosly - I haven't read the article but I imagine the theory is that the carp is working so hard to get the bait swallowed, it misses the hook passing it's lips. Seems like an OK idea, but you would need a bait the fish are really going for. can't see an artificial working for example. Otherwise I am going to start hair rigging pebbles.

No reason why it shouldn't work at all Lead in PVA bag full of crumb, pellets chopped and whole boilies with hook nicked into bag used to work a treat for me. I even used stringers attached to the hook with no problems. Are you suggesting putting the lead, and the hook all in the bag, or just the lead? either way I see a problem with the hook bait finishing up some distance from the freebies (depending on where your rig sits on the line. I have never used PVA with a heli/chod rig although I would like to. The reason I haven't is I see either the hookbait being several feet from the freebies or else a weighty PVA bag pulling the rig out of position on the cast. If I could work around these issues then I would love to hear about it in more detail.

personally I see the stiff hair as a "feature" of mono hooklinks rather than a problem. The stiffness means that the hook position in relation to the bait is somewhat predictable. I guess it depends on the thickness of the nylon used though - I tend to use quite low BS nylon for hooklinks, so it is not really that stiff.

There is not really much strain on the hair - you could probably just lay it along the back of the hook alongside a dummy hair of the hooklength. tie knotless knot and cut the dummy hair as appropriate. can't see a carp sucking that off the hook tbh. personally I just use mono for the hair, but I generally use low BS mono hooklinks as there are very few snags. can cause a problem with pellets as the hair has no purchase on the drilled pellet hole, but specialist pellet stoppers do the job a treat.

no leadcore is obviously safer. use a split shot instead of/next to the locking bead on the lead side of the mainlne , to keep the rig on bottom if you need to.

I wouldn't say I use one every time, but most of the time for sure. A major difference in my rig than what is described here is that I use either a rig ring or a small swivel on the end of my hooklink. This eliminates wear on the hooklink loop from the link. Once the whole thing (quicklink, swivel/ring) is covered in a length of silicon tubing this is a pretty much bombproof solution. The only drawback is that sometimes I need to remove the swivel to thread on a PVA mesh, but it is very easy even with cold hands to loop a swivel onto the link. On the same lines - using a quicklink makes it a very simple matter to tie several identical links and prepare a new PVA bag/link in advance so all you need to do is reel in, swap links and cast out, and no wear to the hooklink

Could the ring cut into the hooklink as it tightened? im not sure that the ring could,but the line could damage the knot........only if the was enough pressure on it ....which i think is unlikley as its only the pressure of sucking/blowing and not playing the fish on the ring/loop plus withthe BS of line used for a chod rig, a small reduction is not the end of the world!

I use a running rig in silt, but you have to be sure the silt is not soft/deep enough for the lead to sink.

no, it's not about critical balance. the rig needs to outweigh the float without the bait (although not by much). When the bait and the bottom hot lifts the float rises, if the fish picks up the bait and swims off, the float dives.

really? I thought the idea was the line below the chod sank into the muck and left the mainline at the chod free. The way you say it the bait would be hanging off the back of a mini flagpole in the silt - I dunno I like that method!

straight hair rig is good, I like to balance my bait on the hair, but it is up to you. use a quicklink on the end of your mainline/lead clip, and then you can construct your PVA bag ready to wind in, clip off the old rig, clip on the new rig/PVA.

an inch of slack will put a length of tubing on the deck. If you really need lines to be tight as a guitar string, then you need to forget about putting the line on the lake bed!

lol - why be embarassed to buy vaseline?? I doubt there are many people using it for "that" use these days when there are proper lubricants etc all over the supermarket!

you never *need* to use tubing. I very rarely do so and it doesn't stop me catching fish. Tubing has it's purposes - to camouflage line and help pin it down. Personally I find that using a sinking line and pulling a *few* inches of line off the spool when setting your rod lays the line flat enough on the bed to avoid spooking fish in the immediate vicinity of the hooklength. If fishing deeper water or at very close range then perhaps a little more slack. That is normally enough. In short, the simpler you can keep your tackle, the less there is to go wrong. don't be seduced by racks of kit in tackle shops, much of it is not essential, and you can spend the money better on good quality hooks etc. a simple sliding rig, with a hook-length of a lighter breaking strain than the mainline is simple, safe and effective. If/when this arrangement is insufficient for a particular problem, then maybe think about a solution, but trying to solve problems before they arise leads to over complex rigs, and if you are not completely certain that the solution is necessary, it is probably better to leave it.

should be fine on mono, so long as the crimp is of the correct size and the right tool is used to close it.

bait should be a little further from the hook for a standard hair rig really, although I have used hairs as short as you are using, and still never deep hooked a carp. what size hooks are you using? with a smaller hook, maybe a disgorger would be better than forceps, although I have never tried using a disgorger on a knotless knotted hook - never had to! seems very strange.

I landed a carp of 14pound on a 1.5lb hooklink (was an accident while fishing for roach!) but it took a long time and some (lucky?) educated guesses of where the fish was heading well in advance. the point to remember - the breaking strain of the line is the limit to how much force you can apply to steer the fish, and if you break the line the fish has a rig to drag around. for most carp fishing, the critical factors are the weight of your baited rig and the distance you want to throw it. if your mainline is strong enough for this, in MOST cases it will be more than enough to guide a fish to the net, but if there are serious snags and you need to really bully the fish away from them then a larger mainline may be essential.

one thing is for sure, with no rig at all, then you will catch nothing. After that, you can think of all the different rigs, which all (presumably) work slightly differently (even if it is not how you think it works). If there is a difference, then it is fairly safe to assume that in a given set of circumstances, then one rig will outperform another. With experience, I guess you might be able to recognise the circumstances that led to a rig working in the past. None of the above seems (to me at least) to be unreasonable, but I tend to prefer a simple hair rig on a light running leger as well. It works reasonably well in most of the circumstances I fish, but I am quite certain that on any particular day, there may well be another rig which would work better (and a few dozen which work less well!

fishing tackle/bait manufacturers producde great volumes of bait/tackle that is considered by some to be unsafe. An example is high oil pellets which many are now starting to think is very unhealthy for fish in the long term. Having said that, carp will happily eat a tiger nut and then poop it out whole, so a bit of rig foam should not present a big problem

Seriously?? You don't know how to connect mainline to a looped end? There is sooooo much wrong here - I call shananigans

I have often ponderd about why/how critical balanced baits/popups etc work, and I donthink it has anything to do with the fish "weighing" the bait as such. My thought is that if a fish is mooching around sucking up boiles, maybe gently to test them for hooks, or just generally grazing, it will get used to the effort in sucking them from the bottom. If it hits a critically balanced bait (including hook/leader) then the effort to suck it off the bottom is much less than expected and the bait flies in much further than the fish intends, putting the hook right into the mouth. Same kind of principle as the pranks you see on TV where someone struggles with a heavy suitcase and then a helpful soul falls on his backside when the case is actually empty. That's my theory, and what is in my mind when putting a rig together. I find it works especially well in conjunction with a feeder based system, maybe then the frenzy of competitive feeding plays a part.

I have caught roach of around 8oz on size 8 hooks hair rigged. To put it in context, the fish could only just open wide enough to fit the gape of the hook, and the hook was so big the point came out the bottom of the jaw like a harpoon! In fact this was no one off - it happened 2-3 times the same session, so I guess if a fish can physically fit the hook in its mouth, then in the right circumstances, it will do so!

then I am not sure I understand the mechanics of the rig (sorry but I am an engineer by trade, and I need to understand these things!) the rig is set so that as the bait is pulled into the mouth, it enters ring end first, and the point is heavy, so it will hang down. to me this looks like the point has a high chance of catching the outside of the lip as it goes in. if the hook enters the mouth, and the fish blows the bait, then I can possibly see how the hook will turn and again head out ring first and the point may catch, but if the fish lifts the bait, it sounds like the chance of hooking against the weight of the weight is reduced somewhat. Perhaps I will tie one up and try messing with it to see how it works. As I sit now I can't see an overall advantage, especially considering the potential for things going wrong. Again, I feel I should apologise - I do not mean to question the advice given, just to understand the action. If I can understand how/why it works I can make a better choice of if/when to use it.

If I understand this right then, the KD rig is designed to hook the fish as the bait is sucked in? ie point passing into the outside of the lip and out of the inside?