The Floating Reed Rig

well done Clive for presenting such a great article. I was very fortunate enough to meet Clive at the recent FM Social and he took great pleasure in showing me how to tie this rig up. I couldnt wait to try it out on a local lake that has a very silty bed and this rig of Clives enables me to fish a small bait on top of the deep silt, I have yet to try it in the margins of a clear lake but im sure it will be just as good. Incidentally I showed it to a bunch of schoolkids who I take fishing and they think its the best thing since sliced bread.


top marks Clive

nice to see someone writing about reed rigs again, its largely a forgotton art these days, but still very effective, another one was the lilly pad rig aimed at tenting carp

Nice one Clive I'd never heard of anything like that before.

Monk, how do you cast a lily pad without it spinning in another direction?

It's brilliant isn't it, like Trev ****y and I met Clive recently at Kingsbury and stared in wonder at this rig.

I had a crack whilst fishing that day and they are so easy to make.

Monk, how do you cast a lily pad without it spinning in another direction?

you dont, you place it in the water and walk backwards releasing the line as you go, the bait is pulled up to the underside of the pad leaving no visible line

Fantastic have you any more hidden gems tucked away Clive from days gone bye?????

Ahhh, brilliant Monk I'll be giving this ago at somepoint!

An absolute gem Clive. I look forward to meeting up again and talking more at Collingham.

Monk,

Don't suppose you fancy adding the lily pad variation to the library to augment Clive's excellent piece?

When Clive showed me his reed varations I was amazed. It is so bl**dy simple and effective! I am astonished that such rigs are not more widely known and employed.

I guess the reason may be that they are free, very effective and don't make any money for tackle manufacturers...

well its not my idea ****y and I have seen in in some of the older books, these are very effective rigs though and rarely written about these day, the other variation is just to drap the bait over the side of an existing lilly pad

The original idea of the rig was simply get me out of the weed and into the clearer water. As a 9 year old boy if I had been able to fund an endless supply of hooks I would never have needed to employ any ingenuity but after loosing two hooks I stopped fishing for a week.

Aftr satisfying the basic requirements of a simple rig it can be modified in so many different ways. As Monk said, the lilly pad is a must to try. You can cast it really easily once you have learned to tie it correctly, as long as you don't try casting a large pad into the wind because you are likely to end up wearing it. Conversely get the wind behind you and you can cast it for bloody miles. Lilly stems and pads are very strong indeed and the most buoyant of all the lake plants. You can hang a bait of a quarter ounce under a lilly pad and you won't sink it.
Think of a warm early autumn evening with thousands of goldem leaves floating on the surface of the lake. They float for days before they sink. They get blown gently to one side of the water in great drifts and many fish will congregate in the shade beneath them. With a following wind you can float a lump of paste or a pressed bread flake half way across a lake under a Horse Chestnut leaf and that won't sink either.
After a while the simple necessity of getting your bait out of the mud or the weed will give way to many different ways of presenting bait to the fish. tench will hoover up an down the sides of the reeds in the margins so why present your bait at the top of the reed when half way up or close to the bottom of the reed enough to catch them.
The dense weed that inhabits many lakes is almost the same as that that you buy from the garden centre to enhance your pond. I don't know the name but it's sold as oxygenating weed. Cut away from its roots it will quickly surface. The next time you haul in a great lump of it and curse. take a single strand of it about a foot long and make a simple rig from it just as I have described on the rigs page. It will last all morning and your bait will never disapear into the weed again. I doubt you will ever find a more natural presentation than this.

I have another very simple rig to put on the site as soon as I can get round to it. It is the fast water floating ledger rig. really basic and simple but super effective for Barbel and Chub in fast flowing water winter or summer.

Thanks for your interest Clive

Nice one Clive, shame I didn't get to see it first hand on the day. The lilly pad rig might even get to spots the zig rig won't reach?

The floating ledger rig sounds very interesting!

That's what I was thinking Steve, I've never got the hang of zig rigs.

Wish I'd thought of it.....

Funny thing is I was fishing a venue a fortnight ago with quite a few floating pieces of reed and stuff on the surface and it was quite noticeable that the carp would go up to these pieces of reed and slurp their lips along them. I assume seeking to scrape off any insects along for the voyage or other goodies. So I was cunningly trying to cast my doggy biccy up and over these floating attractors, then reel up so that the bait was just dangling over the side.... worked reasonably well too. So I can see where these rigs are coming from. suspect they might work especially well cast at the base of a stand of reeds etc ? Tempt out the odd carp that wouldn't otherwise touch a thing but stay hidden in the snags....

It opens up a whole world pf possibilities doesnt it.

I fancy trying this on a local lake where the fish have seen everything. The carp can rarely be caught away from the weed (large beds of potamogeton) and rip straight into it when hooked. My variation will be to replace the paternoster lead with just enough leadcore to pin the reed down and to freeline at close range right up to the weed. Hopefully, with no leads or other bits to snag up I'll get more fish out.

That sounds like an excellent variation Bobby. Love to see the finished rig especially if it works and there's no reason why it shouldn't.

My hands are a bit poorly at the moment Clive, but I'll give it a go as soon as I can and let you know how I get on. Thanks for the encouragement.
Have you any thoughts on bait? I fancy using naturals. Maybe a small lob with enough air injected to just hold up hook and bait, or a locust or similar from the pet shop.
A very small worm with a tare might usefully mimic a water snail. The list goes on, I suppose.

There are lots of natural baits Bobby. You could use maggots, casters, worms, insects and anything that occurs naturally in the water or out of it. Also cockles, which can be attached directly to a hook or thread one or more onto a hair rig. Also try shrimps and prawns and other sea foods and freshwater mussels are a favvourite of carp where they occur naturally.

Thanks Clive, In a rare moment of inspiration I recalled a recent article in AT extolling the virtues of sea baits for coarse fish. Prawns have been successful for me in a variety of situations but as I mentioned the fish in this particular venue have seen it all. With this in mind the fish are now going to see something totally new ! I'm going to fish a sodding great RAGWORM, threaded on the hooklink with a size 6 sticking out of its gob and fished at the bottom of the weed stem. Leadcore or sinking rig tube in a similar colour to the weed should hopefully prevent tangles.
It remains to be seen ,though, whether the carp are too frightened to eat it. The b****rs scare me senseless. In any case it should be interesting to see the weed become mobile as the rag explores its new domain, putting the willies up the pond life.

Good luck Bobby. Why not try grubbing around in the mud by the margins with a fishing net or even a small landing net. all the natural baits the your intended catch will naturally eat will be there.

Where natural baits are concerned the fish not only know what they like to eat but exactly where, in lake or stream, that they can best find it so its not a lot of use taking bait fom the margins and then chucking it into the middle of the lake, unless of course that bait would naturally be found there.

I noted your question in another thread about using slugs for carp and I can not find a definitive answer in all of the reference that I have, albeit many anglers have said that they have taken Carp on slug. I have always sworn by slugs for Chub and Barbel but have no experience using them as bait for Carp as I am not now a Carp fisherman. Carp naturally grub around for their food, mouthing around in the lake bed and up and down the reeds. I have also noticed whilst watching the carp in my son in laws large pond that when surface feeding they can not see the food as they take it in their mouths. They can see it about a foot away but as they reach the food on their final approach they loose sight of it completely and seem to rely on their trajectory through the water to end up in about the right place. I am not sure what value this observation has but the natural sucking and blowing habit of the Carp appears a bit hit and miss, a kind of two stage operation, suck the bait in, decide if you like it, blow it out if you don't sort of thing. Again I don't know what this has to do with slugs but it would appear that, during this sifting process, they will take just about any food that is natural within their environment. There exists a large black water slug that, on maturity, makes its way to the surface in the margins and hatches into a large beetle. I am aware that they will eat this one if found so why not other species of mollusk that may inadvertantly have been washed into the margins.

Roll on the end of the monsoon season. - Clive