theobeeus

amazing river quite possibly best coarse fishing river in England too, massive perch, great pike, amazing barbel, all sorts

No but please let us know what it's like as I have a feeling it will be better than the handful of high profile carp books I read that I thought were all rubbish and have put me off carp literature quite a bit to be honest

I can sort of see your point, but leadcore doesn't lift scales, and barbless hooks are far more damaging than microbarbed, and carp do not suffocate out of water for a good few hours.. Hopefully most people are are very carefully playing fish, landing them and treating them right o the bank, and weighing, photographing and returning them with less than 3+ hours faffing, and also keeping an eye out for bad anglers, otters, gill nets, long lines, litter and pollution and providing carp with a valuable food source while they're at it. In short, bad fishing is most definitely worse than safER fishing, which is the point of the thread.

Still you would be better off with a proper snag safe bore ring/link than just a swivel hanging on the line. Like I said Enterprise do good ones. Also you would probably like the Angletec system. It is very clever, I bought a whole load of them. I don't use em as I prefer helicopter rigs at the moment, but will I'm sure switch one day: http://www.angletec.co.uk/dynamic-lead-system.html

Enterprise snag safes all the way Cut those horrible lead swivels off with pliers I do it all the time

If you want fully anti tangle mate, ditch the anti tangle sleeve and the massive blob of putty and slide a pva bag down the hooklink with the hook embedded in it, use a wafter instead of a pop up, and while you're at it ditch that horrible curve shank hook because they cause mouth damage

I had dreadful problems with 8lb double strength and found it to be the worst material I have ever used, snapping at a measured 3-4lbs

thanks for that I was just giving an opinion post reported

When was the last time you put a few of your beloved nuggets in a water tank mate? Reeling in to find snotty white residue all over your hookpoint, as well as seeing, every day I went past my tank the same expensive 'premium brand' nuggets floating there after several weeks kinda put me off the things a bit somehow

In my experience you have to do your own digging mate. Just being honest here but nobody knows what level your carp fishing is at or anything so they are not going to throw venues at you just like that. there are hundreds of different types of venues everywhere that suit an individuals level, what they want, what kind of skills and tackle they have etc. etc. etc. I worked out exactly what I wanted: good value fishing, good chance of getting takes with a possible twenty or thirty when I got to know the water well, small water, beautiful venue, and not too hard, I also believe strongly in trying to 'crack' one venue at a time rather than drifting around to all sorts of places getting a bit despondent cos u don't know the place well enough to catch em That suited perfectly my style and level of angling.. I don't take it too seriously and am more of a pleasure carper.. I still enjoy it fiercely though mind Settle in a bit, relax, and start patronising a local tackle shop and fishing the easiest to find local dayticket. Things will just pan out naturally. It took me years to find my club water as it is a bit secretive.. no wonder as it is an absolute jewel and incredibly good value. just take it slowly and keep your ear to the ground mate good luck

You haven't seen my club lake.. Besides, syndicates are ridiculously expensive (way beyond my reach), and often very stuffy and cliquey full of intolerably arrogant twits frankly.

I feel pretty confident I fish the best club lake in the UK! Seriously though I know I could never even begin to verify that in any way as there are thousands, the point is that it is such a cracking venue, beautiful, wild, exceptionally well run, full of mystery and big fish that I cannot imagine why anybody would want to spend vast fortunes fishing only dayticket venues. I spend in a YEAR what a dayticket would cost to fish for 2.5 nights!!!!!!!!! How absurd is that???? AND it is BETTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JOIN A CLUB!!!

Not quite sure what you are asking mate but as regards bait I always tell people that there is a whole world out there beyond boilies if you use your imagination

Onions mate. I have pet onions.

I have bailiffing experience on French lakes that went very well indeed, am an exceptionally good cook and professional chef, have a great attitude and thorough passion for and good experience in carp fishing, as well as great conscientiousness, and the 'common touch'. I might be interested in talking to you about a position. Please PM me if you want to discuss things further mate.

Personally I don't see the point in combi rigs and have tried them many, many times whilst doing far better on pure and semi stiff braids etc, and pure stiff rigs but I still like the idea of a combi and in my opinion the perfect material for it is fluoro I like my .37 Seaguar ace hard stuff a lot, I use it as a leader all the time and it is a lovely material. amazingly the BS is 23lb, and trust me that is a very unusual strength to diameter ratio for fluorocarb, most other readily available fluoros I have come across are horribly thick and ungainly best thing is try a few and dig around. In my opinion if you want a genuine proper combi rig you have to have that stiff section stiff, and while you're on the case, why not make it invisible too? Also be careful about what you are fishing over because if it is even slightly weedy you are going to have your hookbait sticking up at a horrible angle with anything at all other than very supple pure braid mate

I tried making my rigs 'ultra minimal' for a while and ditching all the metal apart from the hook but I ended up getting fed up of tying knots and wasn't happy with the way the rigs were performing.

Dunno but I can only highly reccomend Jim Gibbinson's 'carp sense', other than that I'm afraid I have read quite a good few, I'm not going to name them but I didn't like them. Chilly's book was quite good.

All materials have different knots they prefer, add in different breaking strains and surface textures, and you have a quagmire of confusion right there. Like I said earlier in my thread, I used to test knots until my digitals packed up doing so. The thing to do is test them using your arms. If they go easy, bin em. And like I said, again, perfection loops seemed a lot stronger than simple loops, so again thanks for the input, but the old bonce is sorted now.

Like I said I binned my glued rigs. Ha ha yes it does make me laugh that he says 'don't ever glue rigs', yet they sell a rig glue. For the record I am not one to believe everything some big shot company manager tells me anyway.

I am sticking to the perfection loops now having dismantled all the (lots of em too) superglued overhand loop rigs I tied up (this is with fairly light braid we are talking about) as they are small and neat unlike a figure of 8 I had an overhand loop go on me with one of the braids I use, and the perfection loops seem a lot stronger, so that will do me, thanks for all the replies but I think sometimes things get too confusing cheers

I have posted all the details on here mate just scroll up or down I'm not typing it all out again cos I'm off down the lake, wish me luck (Nash chain reaction on the hair)

And before you say 'I said 4 and that's 3'I already said that solid bags were the best of all tangle free rigs, but I don't use them as I like long hooklinks. So that's 4 reasons not to need those horrible pva nuggets on your hair, fully explained

Anyway now you mention it, perhaps I was being a little bit unneccessarily secretive about my 4 failsafe anti tangle rigs, but there is no rocket science in any of it anyway, all proven methods in wide circulation for a long time now, so here you go: Pva mesh bags get used wrongly in my opinion nicked onto the hook If you thread a neat bag of pellet down the hooklink properly and embed the hook in it, then you have an almost tangle free rig for all those worried about a big bag, start dampening and compressing the pellet more, dampened pellet does not melt PVA! Also, ditch all the anti tangle sleeves, sinkers etc from the rig doing this, all they will do is hinder the threading on of the bag and rip the bag up, just a neat loop and a quick change swivel is all you need.. and to prevent the hooklink bumping off the quick change swivel, and for neatness, just mould putty round it, job dne Groundbait on the hair.. this has been refined by Nash - called chain reactions. People put them on the hooklink, but I use one on the hair = no tangles, also a richworth rig tablet, same thing in a way, a hard, drilled, dissolving anti tangle nugget made of food! Brilliant! Also what about the good old method? I make mine so simple it is unbelievable, look for the right leads: what could possibly be better than a small gripper lead!? Mould groundbait around a very small gripper lead neatly, plug baited hook in, job done. All far superior to pva nuggets, like I said I don't like pva nuggets any more but do still use them to raise zig rigs up and help them stop tangling, and to plug my running lead clips o the cast sometimes. Happy now!?

I did a lot of testing last night mate Yes overhand loops are strong as you say, and were probably more than fine for the mass of rigs I ended up retying, but I did notice a few times, especially with the more supple braids I use, that they kind of strangle the line and break at the knot under a lot of pressure. This pressure was at shark fishing levels as I am a fairly big fella, but nevertheless the overhands were always the ones to go, I didn't try figure of eights which are supposedly a bit stronger than overs, just tried new perfection loops which were way stronger than simple overhand, also tested the good old grinner to swivel which was the same thing, stronger than the overhand loop I shall be using the overhand as a bait stop only from now on.