When should I vary the length of my feeder hooklink?
“A longer hooklength gives a slower-falling hookbait”
IASSUME that you are talking conventional feeder fishing with an open-end or window feeder on natural waters, rather than for carp with Hybrids.
If I have no advance information on the venue I will always kick off with a 50cm hooklength. From this point I can then shorten it or tie on a longer link, depending on how many bites I’m getting and how many fish I’m catching.
I carry boxes full of spools of different lengths, but that’s not practical for everyone. My advice here would be to tie your hooklengths at 1m long. You will then have the option to shorten it if need be. This also means less time spent tying hooklengths in advance.
When to shorten the link
If I start to get indications on the tip but not many proper bites I will shorten the link to see if the indications are caused by fish feeding close to or around the feeder.
The same applies if I am missing bites. I will initially try shortening my hooklength to see if that helps. Shortening things, in theory, makes the rig more positive. That should help to magnify bites so you can read them that little bit better and convert more of them into fish in the net.
…and when to go longer
If I’m getting no bites or indications, then rather than just sitting there doing nothing, I’ll lengthen the hooklength to, say 1m, to see if that makes a difference. When the water is very clear you’ll often find that long hooklengths will produce more bites, and I believe there are two reasons for this.
First, in clear water the fish tend to feed off bottom and this is particularly so with roach and hybrids, even skimmers at times. A longer hooklength gives a slower-falling hookbait which produces more bites, as the hookbait spends more time where the fish actually are, in midwater. This is also a scenario where floating maggots come into their own – even if they don’t keep the hook off bottom, they do slow its descent which in turn leads to more bites.
Second, when the water is clear, fish often back off the feeder completely. Again, when this happens a long 1m-plus hooklength tends to be best and will lead to more action.
Fishing in coloured water
When the opposite applies and the water is highly coloured with low visibility, shorter hooklengths of 50cm or less come to the fore. The fish aren’t feeding on sight any more and instead rely on the scent
coming from the bait in the feeder. In this situation it makes sense to get your hookbait closer to the feeder, because this is where the fish are likely to be!
Below the surface
Some anglers will tell you that no matter what the length of your hooklink is, the hookbait falls on top of the feeder when things have settled. If that were the case, why on some venues can you get bites on a 1m hooklength and not on a 50cm one?
I’m not talking about bites on the drop, but those where you wait three or four minutes before the bite, which is more than enough time to know the hookbait is firmly on the bottom. I’m not saying that a 1m hooklength means the hookbait will fall 1m away from the feeder, but it must make a difference to the presentation.
Otherwise, when waiting a few minutes for a bite, the hooklength length would become irrelevant. I can only think that on big waters, any tow on the lake perhaps helps to straighten out the hooklength. Either way I’m sure that longer hooklengths can and will produce bites when shorter ones fail.
Carp fishing hooklengths
I’m now going to touch on hooklengths for carp on Method and Hybrid feeders. I know that some anglers use different lengths for different species – for example, a longer link for carp and a shorter one for F1s. I’ve always believed that 4ins is the optimum length for all of my carp work, so I tie all of my hooklinks this length.
I’ve experimented with longer and shorter hooklengths but seen no real benefit, and at times I’ve even felt it to be a negative thing. Too short and you can hook a lot of fish on the outside of the mouth, too long and you run the risk of missing too many bites!