Should you use Chod Rigs when not fishing over chod?

They asked: The Chod Rig was originally designed/created to be fished over just that, chod. But have you ever used it in open water or over clean areas and if so, how have your results been?

Oh yes, if the fish are un-pressured and they’ve not seen it before, then there’s no reason why they won’t have it even on hard gravel or clear shallow water. Obviously it depends greatly on the water. The Chod Rig is pretty blatant when you think about it, just the fact that it’s a pop-up makes it so, but add in the big hook swinging about in full view, and subtle is definitely not a word best suited to its description. The thing is, what is blatant? It might well be blatant to carp that have seen it all, but somewhere else, maybe a rarely fished big pit or a barely fished stretch of river, somewhere the carp aren’t so on guard, it might not matter one bit. That’s the most important thing to remember with Chod Rigs: on the right venue they’ll work on any bottom, and in the early spells of using them I had no qualms about fishing them out in the lake, in the edge, over firm ground or over soft. They just worked everywhere I used them. I was lucky enough catch good fish on them back then in situations where I’d probably think twice about using them today, on bottoms clean enough for other presentations type thing.

One caught on the faithful old Chods. For a long while those rigs pretty much well lived on my rods

Nowadays I’m a bit more fussier with where I use them, but only because I know that both the Hinge and the Chod in one guise or other will have already been heavily used. Those two rigs are still many anglers number one go-to’s, and so I’d rather have something different on if I can.

On most waters I’ve fished in recent times I’ve mainly taken a bottom bait approach, but I still love the simplicity of fishing Chods, just being able to flick a bait wherever looks likely and hope for a drop… even half a drop will do!

This coming week I’m going somewhere wild and rarely fished for a two nighter with a couple of friends, a bit of a social outing, and I can guarantee that all three of us will be thinking along the same lines, and we’ll all have Choddies on our rods. A trip out the blue, no prior prep work, big pit and a low stock. We’ll be hoping for a sign, just one small sign to flick a Choddy to, and for those kind of trips on those sort of un-pressured waters they’re still absolutely perfect.

It’s not the best of scans, but another Chod caught fish, this time from the muddy, flowing waters of the tidal Thames

Wasing’s big ‘Fairground Common’, taken hard on the bottom with nuts. Bottom baits of one description or other have formed a much larger part of my fishing than pop-ups in recent years, but on the right venue I’d still have Choddies back on again in a flash

One seemingly unlikely place where I used Choddies was the tidal Thames. It was around 2005, when the whole Chod thing was at its peak and confidence in them was through the roof. They virtually lived on the rods back then, and I had a really effective batch of spicy flavoured cork-dust pop-ups which just had to be tried out on the river. And so Choddies it was, and of course, they worked just the same. In fact, now I get thinking about it, I used them on the non-tidal river at Kingston during the winter a year or two before that as well. And they worked well on the Lea Valley Relief Channel too, summer and winter, in the slow and silty section, and the faster and firmer river section.

I’ve had success on them on all types of waters and all sorts of bottoms thinking about it, but nowadays, on the more pressured waters, places they’re likely to have already been well used, then I tend to only use them when absolutely necessary, generally when it’s the very best way of presenting a bait over the top of weed. Also at times when the water clarity has changed, maybe going a bit cloudier due to algae for example, as again I’ve seen them suddenly start doing the business at these times, on waters were I couldn’t get a take on them whilst the water was clear.