Fishing Science – Micro-Hair Rigging To Save The Day

The berg winds in the Eastern Cape can make fishing very unpleasant and I have had to keep my eye on the weather for the last three weeks in order to get a gap to go do some serious fishing – and it was a day when both my father and I learnt a valuable lesson... Finally the weather was playing along and I chose to visit a local dam, well stocked with carp and where I have caught a great number of fish over many years. The dam is a small private dam with carp that average between 500g to a kilo, although there are larger fish and I have on occasion taken fish of over five kilos there. I used normal finely crushed maize as ground feed which I had boiled and prepared the previous evening in anticipation. As it was a one day trip I didn’t take a great variety of baits and because I know the dam well, I focussed on baits which are typically productive on this water. Part of my bait arsenal was soft white dough, whole maize, tigernuts, FX floats and Tjop Tjop super soft floaties and earthworms. I arrived at the dam just after 8am, feverishly unpacked my tackle and pondered my approach. The dam is small so I typically use shorter rods here, but I just had to take my 12 foot carp rods on this day as they hadn’t been out for a while. At the water the first thing that struck me was the very low water level, which meant I had to adapt my game plan a little. Low water levels often alter the feeding patterns of the fish as the change in water depth causes structure which was previously much deeper to now be in shallow water. Shallow areas receive more light that could attract more fish to these new feeding grounds. I quickly scouted around and saw an enticing sand bank which ran into the dam near the inlet that would provide an excellent place to set up for the day. Inlets of small dams are always good areas to fish for carp, one reason being that this is often an area where large amounts of soft substrate accumulates which in turn provides ideal habitat for carp to grub around and root in. When I’m bank angling I often use different traces on either of my rods to find which pattern I should settle on. My first rod was rigged with a standard Rietvlei trace with two #10 hooks each baited with a small dough paste bait. The second was rigged with a sliding Rietvlei trace. Both rods had feeders on. The area I was fishing was narrow, so casts were short, less than 30m in most cases. This can be very tricky to fish if you’re using longer 12 foot rods, but with a short adaptation to my casting style it presented very little obstacle. It wasn’t long before the first solid take and I was briefly into a fish that tore the hook out. This was rapidly followed by the other rod going in, and after a brief but strong fight my first fish for the morning was being slid into the net. The fish were definitely feeding in the area, and I quickly started to spend more time fighting fish than waiting behind the rods. After catching four fish in quick succession I was becoming intensely frustrated with missing a lot of takes. The fish would take the bait strongly but I would consistently miss the strike. This was common in this dam, and I usually change to a float when this happens, which can be a deadly technique to target skittish biting fish. This time however, I was keen to try something different, and reached for my boilie equipment. I took out a spool of 15lb brown coloured, neutral buoyancy braid and setup up very small hair rigs using #14 bent back fly hooks. These hooks are extremely sharp and work superbly well as hair rig hooks. I knew the size of the fish was not going to very large, but the challenge was to succeed in improving my hookup rate and consistently landing them. The baits I used on a hair rig was a single or double whole corn kernel, or a small dough paste bait behind the hook on the hair rig. I stuck to the same dips, which were Vaaldam, Tjop Tjop and FX. Because I had incorporated some cotton wool into my dough mix the dough did not slip over the stopper. I used a combination of rigid orange stoppers and clear silicon stoppers. I put my new plant to the test and it was not long before a solid run lead to a good hook-up and I landed another fish. Thereafter I landed several fish in short succession, each time with a good run followed by a solid hook-up. I frustratingly also lost a couple of fish which hooked up on submerged branches. The new rig was working wonders and was a demonstration of how a small change in tactics can remarkably increase your hook-up rate, even when you are using the same baits. In nearly all the fish that were taken, the hook was firmly embedded at the edge of the lower lip, which is very typical for a bent back hook. The hook naturally orientates its point downwards when pulled forward by the line. This action continued until 13:30 pm when there was a midday lull in the feeding activity. Later on in the afternoon, I also experimented with floaties but with little success and took a couple more fish on my micro-boilie rigs. It seemed that the one or two corn kernels or soft dough boilies were the winning recipe. At about mid morning, I was joined by my father and between the two of us our final tally was 33 fish, not bad for a day’s fishing! The lesson learnt from the day was how important it can be not to just change the baits when you have weak or skittish biting fish, but also a slight change in the trace, which can mean the difference between a frustrating day of missed strikes and lost fish or a full net of fish.