We Need To Talk About... Rigs!

Who spends hours thinking about rigs, imagining ever more fiendish arrangements of ironmongery and moulded plastic? If you don’t, you’re missing out because cogitating on rigs is one of the great joys of carp fishing. And, as the last few inches of your presentation are the most important, an effective rig, alongside pukka bait and being on the fish, is arguably the most critical part of the challenge.

And hands up, who still believes in the ultimate rig? My second Bivvy Tramps book (2014) was all about the eternal quest for an ultimate rig. It revolved around the fictional idea of a video camera in your lead and a hooklink material you could contract via WiFi, thereby nailing finely-honed steel deep into cypry lips. At the time, it was the most outrageous rig idea I could imagine, but with the technology available ten years on, it doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched. But just because we can do something, does it mean we should?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for a return to the ‘good old days’. Yes, they were exhilarating, as catching a carp of any size was a wondrous and comparatively rare experience, but they were also frustrating and slow. It was a time when we buried our hooks into donkey choker-boiled specials or enormous lumps of luncheon meat free-lined or on two-foot link legered hooklinks. When we sat behind rods four feet off the ground, watching our bottle tops twitching around on long drops, wondering when to strike. Does anyone remember striking? In truth, we were living in the dark ages, with blunt hooks on inefficient rigs and missed more takes than we nailed!

And then the carp gods delivered, or rather Lenny Middleton and Kevin Maddocks did. I vividly remember the astonishment I felt on first hearing of the hair rig and thinking it was clearly a wind-up. But no, the self-hooking rig revolution had arrived, and overnight our twitchy bites became blistering runs. I remember standing in John Wilson’s Tackle Den on Bridewell Alley in Norwich, watching and listening in disbelief as he tied us a four-inch fixed bolt rig with an ultra-short hair. It was too much for me, and I stuck to my 18-inch free-running long hair rigs for at least another year. Long hairs ruled my world!

In fact, while I am deeply nostalgic for long hairs, or any hair, I still like a bit of separation between hook and bait. And this is largely because for the last forty years I have essentially been a braided hooklink bottom-bait kind a guy. The mechanics of the bait going in and the hook dropping down onto the bottom lip has remained my principal rig theory until relatively recently.

This brings me neatly to my next headbender: the Chod Rig revolution. Luddite that I am, I placed myself firmly in the ‘Chods are for nods’ camp, and missed out on a stack of bites when they were feeding in anything other than clean bottom bait territory. Doh! I convinced myself that the lack of vertical and horizontal movement limited their effectiveness and that they were prone to hook pulls. I haven’t fished them enough to reach any firm conclusions, but clearly, when combined with a super sharp hook, they can be a major edge. And as for Hinge Stiff Rigs, I know Terry, Nigel and co caught monsters on them, that they eliminate concerns about movement while retaining superb presentation over all kinds of chod, plus they reset time after time, but I confess I just couldn’t tie them, and so stupidly never incorporated them into my approach.

In fact, it has only been with the advent of ready-made Ronnies/Spinners that I finally conceded pop-ups and stiff rigs are a seriously effective innovation, even for cack-handed idiots like me, and that I should open my mind and let in the light of the twenty-first century. I guess the lesson to be learned is you can lead an old carper to the lake, but you can’t always teach him new tricks. Apologies for the mixed metaphors!

While I have now dabbled with stiff hooklinks, my preferred approach is to fish Ronnies on four inches of braid wrapped in PVA tape for the cast. Is that simply misguided or giving me a little edge over all you stiff link fluorocarbon crimpers? 

Of course, while we’re talking about rigs, I have to mention Zigs. I guess we could trace their origin all the way back to the suspended crust tactics of the 1960s, and certainly, I remember an early version in one of Andy Little’s books. But it was 2009, on the Woolpack, when I first took notice. That spring, an angler smashed the place apart on his flip-flop rigs! Bits of black foam fished mid-water was just something they had never encountered. It seemed brilliant at the time, mimicking their natural aquatic insect prey. Yes, I tried them, and yes I caught, but something seemed a bit off. There were too many foul hookings, and too many lost in the weed. They have their place, but I’m not a big fan.

The point I’ve been building to is that the hair rig is the ultimate carp rig! And that since its invention over forty years ago, we’ve made only minor improvements. The basic self-hooking mechanics of more recent rigs are essentially the same, and for me, that’s enough. We know from all the underwater films that our rigs are not perfect and that we get done over far more than we realise. So, by all means, tinker with your end tackle. What you do in the bivvy is your business! And when you’ve finished, use the myriad of marvellous components at our disposal to conjure cunning hair-rig variations, perfectly adapted for your particular angling situations.

But I’m putting a flag in the ground, drawing a tentative line beyond which I say we should resist the pernicious creep of technology and automation. Let’s not get to the stage where every pick-up is a take that can be viewed from your bivvy via micro rig cameras. I’m giving a shout for angling on a level swim, where the carp sometimes gets away with it, and success is hard won. I’m advocating for limits to the rig revolution, for not losing the art, craft and mystery of carp fishing!