Day-Ticket Carp Tips
Get your casting bang on the money
INCREASINGLY these days, carp anglers quantify the distances they are fishing at in ‘wraps’, rather than in the traditional units of feet, metres or yards.
This obsessive attention to accuracy can be pivotal to success. The last thing you want is to bait up a promising-looking spot out in the pond, then cast your baited rigs 10 yards past it.
The way to make sure that your freebies and baited rig are sitting side by side is by using short poles known as distance sticks.
They are simple to use too, once you have got the hang of it.
Once you’ve mastered the art, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without them!
LEARN THE BASICS
To begin with you need to use a marker rod, or a bare lead on the end of a braided mainline, to find the potential ‘spot’ that you want to fish to. This could be anything ‘promising’, such as a gravel bar, the edge of a drop-off or a clear spot amid weed.
Once you’ve found the spot, you need to tighten down gently until you are in direct contact with the lead. Keeping the rod in the typical casting release position, you then need to put the line in the clip on the reel and wind in the lead.
Next, poke your two distance sticks (you can use banksticks if need be) into the ground 12ft (a rodlength) apart on the bank behind your swim.
Then, placing the lead next to one of these sticks, feed out line from the reel and move the rod-tip towards the other stick. It’s important not to let the line spill off the spool freely when you’re doing this, but to instead keep it under light tension. Go round the other stick with the mainline, all the while keeping it quite taut, and back round the other stick in a ‘figureof-eight’ motion.
Keep doing this until you reach the point where the line is in the clip, all the while keeping a tally of how many ‘wraps’ you have made. It’s then possible, using simple maths, to work out the exact distance that your ‘spot’ is from the bank, and for you to replicate this with your fishing rods, ensuring that you loosefeed, and fish, precisely the same area.
bUILd A MEnTAL MAp
Over the course of a season, you can use this method to record a host of your favourite ‘spots’ around a lake.
In a notepad, jot down details of the distance they are from the bank, and any notable trees or other landmarks on the horizon that they line up with.
By doing so, whenever you turn up at the lake, you’ll be able to land on the money every single time. And you won’t even need to use the marker rod to do so – simply refer to your notes.
It’s also easy for anglers to share information using this uniform measurement. Some fishery owners and helpful venue regulars will even alert fellow anglers to known hotspots using this ‘code’.
MARKIng THE LInE
For all its advantages, using distance sticks can be a timeconsuming process, especially if you are casting regularly. That’s where the use of marker elastic comes in.
Essentially, it’s the same as pole elastic, and many carpers choose to use exactly that, as it can be cheaper. Both are absolutely ideal for tying around your mainline without causing damage.
The resultant knot – which, essentially, is an old-fashioned ‘stop-knot’ – should be tied at the distance you are fishing at, so that you don’t need to weave your line around sticks. Just cast out and wait for the sound of the elastic going through the rod rings to alert you to your desired distance.
Clip up the line and simply aim your next cast at your spot.
THERE was a time when all we had to choose from in terms of stick float bases were cane or lignum.
Cane was used for close-in work and lignum-based floats were used for fishing further out.
In the 1970s and 1980s came wire-stemmed floats, and then Trent stick float expert John Allerton changed everything when he developed stick floats with alloy stems.
That’s pretty much how things stayed until one day I was sat behind my good friend Tony Birt. I love rummaging through other anglers’ float boxes, and when I came across some stick floats with very heavy bases that Tony had made himself I immediately knew that a new chapter in stick float fishing was about to be written.
Traditional alloy stem stick floats have always been made with fairly short 1.6mm stems, but Tony had jumped right up to 2.4mm. As a result, he had created floats which could be cast long distances with ease. I stole a couple of floats out of his box (don’t tell him Pike!) and had a day on the Severn testing them out.
The floats were really easy to cast a long way, and the other major thing that impressed me was how easy they were to control. The heavy stems kept the floats on line when the line was mended, and control was much easier than with a lighter base material.
Several pre-production samples were made before I was happy that we’d got the balance right between float body and stem.
Eventually we arrived at two different sets of floats, which I christened No1 and No2 Heavy
Base sticks.
Last year I took the development a stage further by using a 2mm stem and smaller bodies to create the No3 Heavy Base stick.