lead core – The Masterblanker

The Chod Rig, where do we start ? At 1st glance it seems to be against all known rig principals. The hook link is super short and can be very stiff ( in the original format), there is a popup fished straight off the bottom, how can a fish be fooled by it ?

Well they are, and in large numbers. If you fish lakes with silt issues, with debris on the bottom ( often know as chod hence the name of this rig) that will get tangled in a normal rig… then this is the setup for you !

Effectively it is a standard helicopter rig with a very short hook link and a pop-up. It is worth pointing out that the rig has to be fished with a popup if the anti “chod” capabilities are to be realised else with a bottom bait the bait may lie in the detritus that you are trying to avoid. The anti silt capabilities are also helped by virtue of the helicopter rig in that you can fish the rig as far from the lead as you desire and if you add on a Solar bag clip with an in-line lead you can even fish a bag of freebies close by.

Another use for the rig, and certainly the one I have put it to most use, is that of a “roving rig” ie a rig that you want to cast out to showing fish, or one that you want to regularly move about in open water when you have little idea what the bottom composition is. If you cast in a rig using a lead clip with a short hook link and you end up casting into 2ft of silt then you are unlikely to catch. With a “chod rig” you know that the rig is working as designed no matter what the bottom is. This was a tactic that I put to good use in France last year and my “roving rod” was set up with a chod rig and single Ccmoore strawberry pop-up. This rig with no freebies and just by moving it every few hours ( or when ever I remembered to be honest) picked up 1-2 bonus fish per day. Anyway onto the rig… Continue reading “Tying the Chod rig using a Domhoff knot”

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”