Please note, this article was originally created as a PDF, I have posted it here as convenience and to make it more web friendly
All of us at one stage started somewhere in our carp fishing lives, and I think that it is sometimes easy to forget that there are beginners coming to the sport all of the time. Recently we have seen many people starting Carp fishing who have not had an apprenticeship from catching skimmers as a child under a father’s watchful eye to later, migrating to carp or another specimen species.
This leads beginners to wonder “ where do I start ?” and often they start by pouring through the magazines for the latest wizz bang rig that uses £8 of swivels and tubing and then they end up blanking. They blank not through lack of enthusiasm but because they didn’t have the confidence to realize that simple is most likely better. Some of the rigs you see in the magazines have been designed for really specialized applications that 99% of us will never see. The cynic in me also suspects that they are to sell magazines and tackle :).
Carp fishing is all about confidence, confidence in your bait, tackle and rigs, in this article I want to cover some really basic rigs that I wish that I had known when I started carping some 24 years ago ( though with a 10 year break). A lot of what you will see here might have been covered by other anglers but I want to boil the rigs down to the very essence of what they need to be. Once you have gotten experience with these rigs feel free to move onto other more complicated rigs as if you have the basics right then you can’t go too far wrong. Continue reading “Beginners rigs – Where to start if you are beginning carp fishing”