In Praise of – Solar Spikers

Do you love to fish D-Rigs but hate tying lasso knots in floss ? Do you have issues in melting the floss with a lighter when it is dark and windy ? do you just think that there is a “better way” tm ? well for those of you who think that there should be, there is the Solar Spiker. In effect they are a small device that you can incorporate into any “D” style rig to allow quick and easy baiting no matter what the conditions are. They are so ingenious I am surprised that no one has copied them as they are really quite simple.

From the close up you can see that they are just a pin with a ring an one end and a barb at the other. You have a few choices when you use them. You can use them on a Drig as I am about to show but you can also use them on the hair and then tip the bait with a plastic bait such as corn to stop the boilie from dislodging during a cast. However I will focus on how they are used in Drigs and more specifically how I use them.

Basically when I make a Drig, instead of putting a ring on the D-Loop and blobbing the tag with a lighter I slip a spiker on the tag, fold back and then blob the free end. This then looks like this :

As you can see the Fox SR hook with the out turned eye perfectly compliments this setup in that with the stiff flurocarbon a traditional hook of this pattern with an in turned eye would create a far more aggressive hooking angle. This can ( under certain circumstances) lead to the hook catching too early in the mouth of the carp resulting in lost fish due to the hook pulling free. When you put it all together with a popup it looks like so

As you can see I have burried the spiker in the CCmoore hellraiser popup, as the popup is a 20mm popup there is no need to tip the spiker with a plastic hook bait however if I was using smaller baits I would pit a piece of plastic corn on the exposed point. Finally when it is all together it should look like so :

Well that is all for now and please don’t forget to let me know if you like these articles and if you have any comments like Dr Frasier Crane, I’m listening.