Is it just my imagaination, or...

[Graham Braithwaite]

Hello again all,

I was fishing at my local lake yesterday, and feel that I might be having a bit of a problem with pop-ups.

Sweetcorn is a very popular and succesful bait there, so I duly mixed a little bit into my groundbait (I wasusing a Method feeder), and had one piece of pop-up sweetcorn on the hook along with a single kernel of the real stuff.

The problem that I was having was that I was getting a few good 'takes' but didn't manage to actually land a fish because I lost every single one. Now, here's the question; Ive pretty much got it into my head that it's the pop-up that's preventing the hook from being 'set' in the fish's mouth - I feel that the fish might be taking the bait, but that the pop-up is 'bumping it' away - and that's the reason why I didn't get to make a catch.

Sadly, being a bit of a slow-headed sort, this only dawned on me at the end - there'd been a big match for disabled anglers the day before, and I just assumed that the fish were (literally!) fed up, and that's what I thought had been the reason up until then.

Maybe I'm right, and maybe I'm wrong and, in any case, I'm swithching to a hair rig tomorrow morning, but I just wondered what any of the rest of you thought, so I'll throw it open for your comments from here.

 

[njb51]

How are you hooking the pop-up sweetcorn? You may be putting the hook to far into it, so that when you bring the hookpoint back out, not much of the point is able the penetrate deep enough. I find artificial sweetcorn can be very lightly hooked and will still stay on.


the other option is to hair rig it.

 

[Nigel Connor(ACA ,SAA)]

Go far the latter option.

Had the same possible problem with artifical casters on the river when feedering with v.small hooks.

 

[Graham Braithwaite]

Hi Jonny,

Many thanks for your reply.

I'm actually trying to hook it up as lightly as I can, and then it push it as far up the hook as I can to leave as much of the hook 'on view' for the other piece of real corn.

I am, in any case, using a hair rig tomorrow, as I don't want to be losing them again, but neither do I want to put off from pop-ups for ever just because of a simple mistake. Maybe I just had an unlucky day!

 

[Nigel Connor(ACA ,SAA)]

Graham,

Are you counterbalancing the corn with a small shot to stop the hook coming too far off the bottom?The atrificial corn is very buoyant and a kernal of real corn wouldn't balance it unless you were using a heavy hook.

 

[Graham Braithwaite]

Thanks Nigel.

I'll post back on here tomorrow to let you know how I actually got on.

 

[Nigel Connor(ACA ,SAA)]

Sorry,posting as I think here.You say "takes"? If the corn was very buoyant could it have been that you may have been foul hooking the fish or they were catching the hooklength round their fins/tail as it wafted around in the swim?This might have been your problem as opposed to hooking difficulties.

 

[Graham Braithwaite]

Nigel; with regard to the counterbalancing: I'm using a No. 10 hook, so maybe that's going to be the problem. It never dawned on me about the weight of the hook so, as much for curiousity now as anything else, I'll rig a set up in a bowl at home.

Why didn't I check this first? Doh!...

 

[Frank "Chubber" Curtis]

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