Stuart with a 30-pounder
A tad early for this article perhaps, however for all of us ‘All Weather’ anglers out there you might find this useful. No doubt as usual we’ll get all sorts of responses from the ‘Don’t talk such crap’ through to the ‘Aha I’m already on this’ finishing with the ‘yep, makes sense to me and I’ll be considering my tactics as we get nearer the time’. Whatever your thoughts, this article is to provoke the mind and to help those anglers out there who are scratching their heads and considering the best ways to tackle their first winter or, in fact, their last! However you look at this article, or whatever you take from this article, it is written by a thinking angler who is always looking to experiment and improve his very own chances in banking that bonus fish when the regular methods aren’t quite hitting the spot.

This late autumn/winter I’ll be looking at changing down a gear or two or, at the very least, scaling down my tactics further than I did last year. I’ll be looking at using smaller boilies and tying my rigs to suit my baits and venues.

At the end of last season I remember speaking with an angler who was relatively new to the sport and who’d purchased all the right tackle for the job in hand. He was keen to get up in the freezing cold week-in week-out, even happy to brave the occasional cold night, but no matter his tenacity, he was struggling like crazy to land a winter carp. Now don’t get me wrong, winter fishing is a completely different world altogether than the warm nights, flowing wine and ‘pain in the arse’ runs when all you want to do is sleep. It’s cold, barren, sometimes desperate and, more often than not, uneventful on the ‘catching Mr Carp’ front.

So after chatting for some time to this angler, we discussed the various tactics available for this particular venue and, chatting further, he showed me his winter rigs. His rigs were made up of a size 4 hook, on a 20lb fluorocarbon boom hosting an 18mm boilie. No issues with this set-up for the hot summer months when all is fishing its nuts off, but for the winter, these rigs were not necessarily going to help him that much.

It seems that some winter anglers tend to follow on with the exact same tactics as they do in the summer. For some this works just fine, but for others, they go home cold and fishless wondering why the guy on the other side of the bank caught again!

I’m not going to waffle on about why the catching of carp slows down in the winter, or even what baits and tactics to use, because this has been done to death. What I am going to do is to offer up a rig on a size 10 hook that I’ve been experimenting with to suit my own late autumn/winter fishing and the benefits of why I will be once again scaling down.

The following pop-up rig can be adapted to suit your own requirements, it can be scaled down even further if you so desire, but for me the size works just fine and the hookhold I get from this rig will give me a firm bottom lip hookhold nearly every time.

The benefits of scaling down in the winter can be mind-blowing. Lets face it, you wouldn’t spod out 10 kilo of boilies or throw in 2 kilos of tigers in the winter because, quite simply, you’d be (nine times out of ten) over-baiting and over-feeding. You’d perhaps scale down to single hookbaits with little or no loose feed. You’d look at casting out a PVA bag with a few ground-up boilies and a small handful of pellet, etc, instead. It’s fair to say that we gear down for winter with regard to bait, so why don’t we gear down on our rigs too?


What you need to make the rig
A crazy exercise I know, but imagine you are now the carp, you’ve stuffed yourself full of boilies throughout early Autumn in order to retain enough fat to carry you through your semi-hibernation period. You want to conserve as much energy as possible so you’re not actively feeding or in fact actively looking to gulp down any morsel that sits in front of you, whereas in the summer you’re competing for food. If you are moving around slowly, conserving energy, are you more likely to spot the angler’s ‘usual trap’ of a size 4 hook and an 18mm boilie, or are you going to shy away and opt for a bait that lends itself more to the surroundings, that’s less visible and doesn’t shout DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!

Now turn the whole ridiculous analogy around and once again become the angler. Do you really want to cast out a rig and a bait that would suit a ‘summer carp’ that’s competing for food? Or do you want to scale down, pay detailed attention to your rigs, baits and presentation and make the difference between getting a take or not?

Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying this is an exact science; that if you scale down you’ll get more runs or bank more fish, all I’m saying is that it’s got to be worth a try hasn’t it?

Stu’s Pop-up Winter Rig

Here goes, this is a scaled down evolution and combination of the line-aligner and the D-rig. Firstly the line-aligner part: This classic rig will turn faster than a standard knotless knot thus ensuring better percentages of hookholds.


Stu’s Pop-up winter rig
The evolvement of this rig over the standard line aligner is the application of a longer shrink tube tail in which, whilst held with pliers over the steam to shrink, you position it in such a way that you change the positioning to take a 45 degrees angle. For the more knowledgeable anglers out their you’ll see that in fact it’s a cross between the famous Withy rig, which was an evolution from the bent hook and the standard line-aligner. It’s that extra bend in the shrink tube that allows the hook to turn faster and causes the carp even more trouble when trying to eject the hook.

This should give me the best of two worlds. One – with the D-rig, you are basing your hooking arrangement on the carp sucking up the bait, the hook looking to turn and whilst taking hold, the rig to stay in place whilst the bait moves back down the D. And two – add to this the extended 45 degrees line-aligner and the whole scenario should present the carp with a rig that will turn no matter what the position and take a firm hold.

Food for thought, if nothing else……

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