Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
Surface controller rig
Carp have featured regularly because they are great fun for celebrities to catch and it is usually possible to get a bite in the middle of the day when most of the filming takes place. As the shows are filmed during the warmer months that has often meant that the fish have been up on the top, and surface fishing has featured in quite a few different episodes. Dean has had mixed success but can certainly recall the times when things have gone right, and the tweaks that he made: “We’ve had a few challenges where we’ve ended up fishing for carp on the surface, and although I haven’t always won them, my set-up has been very similar throughout,” he said. “On one of the occasions where I did score a victory, I was teamed up with Jessica Hayes and we were fishing in the White Acres complex down in Cornwall. “Despite it being a cloudy, drizzly day, the fish were on top but they were mostly staying tight to cover, and this meant having to get the hookbait very close to far bank rushes to get a bite. We used one of the small Interceptor controller floats and started off with the standard length of hooklink of 5ft-6ft. This made it very hard to cast close enough to the cover, however, and I was also noticing fish coming up all around the float but ignoring the hookbait. “In the end, I cut the hooklink down to 30in and we could now get it tighter to the reeds. Often the carp would come up and mouth the controller before turning around and nailing the hookbait. It made a really big difference on the day and won the challenge for us. “I put out a mixture of different sized floating pellets and then try to switch them on to the larger ones, so you can actually see your hookbait, if you’re matching it to your freebies! Just make sure you don’t mix the sizes as it makes it impossible to catapult them out accurately – I keep them in separate buckets. “A real game-changer for surface fishing is the use of Raspberry Goo, and I squirt about an eighth of a bottle into a small bucket and mix it with a little water and pour it over my freebies. This really gets the fish going and I end up with more in front of me. I want the hookbait to stand out even more though, so every cast I coat it in Goo. “I’ve played with different hookbaits, including using pellets that match my freebies, but now I always use one of the pastel pink, barrel-shaped pop-ups from Mainline. These have made a huge difference on a number of occasions on different waters, going from having my hookbait ignored or rejected, to getting takes and hooking fish! “As long as I am not fishing more than 30 yards out I prefer to side-hook them as I find that I connect with more bites, but for longer range I fish them on a very short hair. I also trim them a bit to rough them up and give a more uneven shape.” His rig consists of 0.10mm Pulse-8 braided mainline to one-and-a-half rodlengths of 8lb Kruiser Control to a suitably-sized Interceptor float for the range being fished at. This is finished off with a 7lb Drag-Line hooklink – heavier if there is weed – to a size 12 Mixa hook.