The Horton Rig was the brain child of Gardner Team member Lee Wagner, whilst fishing on the hallowed banks of the R.K Horton Kingsmead Complex. It is essentially a presentation tailored to catch the fish that are showing over an area that is both firm and relatively weed free - and is his own tweaked [...]
After the enormous success of the Ronnie Rig, and the improvement in rig mechanics and reaction simply by putting a Covert XT Kwik Lok Flexi Ring Swivel onto the eye of the Mugga hook, it wasn’t much of a leap forward to apply the same tweak onto the already successful German rig to give the [...]
The design, development, testing and manufacturing of hooks is one that takes a huge investment in terms of time and effort. It’s a critical terminal item that must be right in every way and therefore new hook patterns literally take years to come to fruition. In the context of the [...]
With only one overnighter a week on my hands I try and plan them wisely. After seeing the forecast due Wednesday night, I asked the misses and she kindly gave me the nod. It’s been a while since we've had a strong warm Southerly wind combined with a pressure drop, [...]
I wanted to write this article about one of my recent sessions when I landed my second UK forty pound carp. After arriving at my Southern Syndicate lake, I began by having a little walk around to try and locate where the fish were, so I had a good chance [...]
The Slip D Rig has accounted for thousands of carp across the UK and main land Europe. It was first invented by Martin Clarke way back in 1986-87 season at Woburn Sands. At the time the rig was first tied using a large ring and dental floss as a hooklink and although it looked a [...]
The initials NS stand for ‘Nice and Simple’ and the rig is just that, very simple to tie but ultra-effective. It’s constructed using a size 6 Covert Dark Incizor and a length of Stiff Ultra Skin. The rig has all the mechanics of a sliding D presentation and it has a small section of coating [...]
My angling has taken a different turn of late. Whilst I have still been angling on the hallowed banks of the famous Wellington Country Park estate lake I’ve necessarily been accompanied by ‘Kev the Destroyer’, my uber lush 10 month old chocolate brained (and furred) Labrador. Let’s just say he [...]
Every year, a few of my mates and I have a trip to Lake Serene in the Champagne region of France, and this year was no different. Having been there a few times, and as we always rotate the swims to make it fairer, I knew it was my turn [...]
My last trip to Acton Top Lake went swimmingly! I arrived to an empty lake, but where many anglers would think ‘fantastic result’ I wasn’t so sure. Let me explain; on the few trips I’ve had time for this season, I’d taken great notice of the carp’s movements observing the [...]
We all know how good the conventional chod rig is at presenting a pop up hookbait down over all sorts of stuff on the bottom; bits of weed, silt and leaves, giving the perfect presentation every time. However, on occasions it can be a little bit blatant. The Roddie is a hugely effective alternative to [...]
It’s been a funny old year on the fishing front... I’ve not really been as succesfull as I would like, but that’s fishing I guess. It’s been hard going on the waters at home too, but I’m not fishing the easiest of waters so blanking is the rule of thumb [...]
The summer has been a dizzying mixture of the wonderfully sublime and the downright painful. Life away from the lakes has been wondrous, with a great family holiday; our first with our beloved Chocolate Labrador Kevin in tow, and was day after day of ‘bimbling’ about on Cornish beaches and [...]
It was last Thursday (29th June) and the ‘Lake of Dreams’ had re-opened at 6AM. The expected stampede of super keen old and new syndicate members never materialised and when the ‘lovely Lordy’ put something up on the group page that there was only a couple on mid-morning my mild [...]
A successful spell through February and March led me to believe that my excellent results I’d been enjoying at the lake during this period of time, with less angler pressure, would unfortunately soon be coming to a close as the weather improved and inevitably more of the other syndicate members [...]
In this article I have decided to write about some of my best sessions during the Spring and let you know how I went about them. At the start of April I had four nights ahead of me, so I decided to setup in one of my favourite swims known [...]
Continuing on from my last trip to the hard pit, I managed to get down there a couple of days later, just to keep the baited spots topped up, as I was planning on doing an overnighter on the Wednesday. Looking at the clock constantly on Wednesday, the time to [...]
I had always maintained an interest in the CWA Fisheries Long Lake project. Not only because it was only a few minutes’ drive from my front door, or even because I fancied fishing exclusively for carp for a while, but it appears to have that something special about it that [...]
For the last 3 years I've chosen to target a really tricky low stock pit for a few months every summer, timed to coincide with the fish spawning on my syndicate lake. In that time I've toted up 28 nights with only one tench to show for all my hard [...]
After enjoying a fantastic season on the Hollybush Lane Lakes Syndicate last year I would have loved to have spent another season there this year especially after my time there was cut short due to illness. However, with my wedding in Portugal on the horizon in September I knew I [...]
