Dave Harrell How the right stickfloat will help you on the rivers this winter
In this new series, Dave explains how there’s more to this style of fishing than you think…
ITHINK many anglers could achieve a lot more with their stick float approach if they gave it a bit more thought. If that sounds too obvious, read on…
BACKGROUND
There was a time when the only stick floats available had a balsa top half and a cane base. This gave the float a bit of casting weight. Then, someone decided to use a denser wood in the form of lignum to create a much heavier base – these could be cast even further.
For years, most commercially made floats ranged from 3No4 to 7No4. If you wanted a bigger float, you used a balsa or an Avon type.
Things didn’t change very much for many years until a brilliant Trent angler called John Allerton came along and changed stick float design by using 1.6mm alloy stems instead of cane. A shoulder on the top of the float allowed it to be more sensitive, and it could held back against the current.
These floats became hugely popular with river anglers, and that’s how the world of stick float fishing stayed for many years.
STICK FLOATS NOW
While I would never want to claim that the radical changes in stick float designs as we know them today have all been down to me, I like to think that I have been instrumental in taking them to another level in terms of what is now available and how we can use them.
For starters, I realised a long time ago that most stick float ranges didn’t include big enough sizes for deep powerful rivers like the Severn. Most only went up to around 8No4, and if you needed anything bigger you had to use an all-balsa or Avon-style float.
That was fine if the fish would respond to hookbaits presented underneath a bulk but, as we’d already realised for many years, fish like big roach often prefer to have baits presented with a strung-out shotting pattern.
What we actually needed were bigger versions of what we’d already got, so back in the early 1990s I designed stick floats which were twice the size, which went up to 16No4. Since then, I’ve produced even bigger sticks but these, I admit, are very specialised and are only needed a few times a season.
The basic design shapes now are shouldered and domed tops.