Rig Camouflage II (The real test!)

Posted by Keith on August 21, 2009 under Carp and Coarse Fishing, Help and Tips | Be the First to Comment

Okay, so we’ve discussed the all important factors of camouflaging all the rig materials in my previous article, but does this really make that much difference to our catch results?

Well, I’ve been out this week for 4 days on a mission to prove the theory of rig camouflage or not as the case might be.

The venue I have chosen for the test is a regular haunt of mine, a private syndicate water near Reading.

The water stands at around 35 acres in size with a mass of features above and below the water.

The ones I’m really interested in being the invisible ones below the surface.

The water has other obstacles to make allowance for; these are numerous underwater obstructions such as old gravel extraction machinery left from the initial dig during the late 60’s to Zebra Mussel beds and the dreaded Signal Crayfish!

The depth varies from around 3 feet to 9 feet at the deepest point. There are many bays, unfishable areas and overhanging trees to also contend with…….so, as you can see I have it all to do just to get into the fish!

My first thought is to target the silt areas as opposed to the gravel as these areas are easier for the crays to locate our baits on. I prefer to stick with a fruity boilie only approach as crays love pellets and fishmeals!

My rig is very basic and is made up of around 11-12 inches of Soft Korda Hybrid braid.

A Wide Gape size 6 hook and a curved piece of dark grey Gardner Covert Shrink tube placed over the hook eye to aid the hooks turn with-in the fishes mouth.

As you can see from the pictures I have shown, the rig materials blend in well with the different kind of bottom materials.

Kryston Dark mantis or Korda Hybrid for over the silt.Korda Supa Natural light brown and green for the gravel and weed.

For this experiment I fished the 3 different materials and rig items for 48 hours over the same patch of silt.

Rods were marked up using marker braid to insure that all rods were fished at the same distance each time. The rigs were placed some 30 feet apart and a small handful of baits placed over each rig (30 boilies).

Each rig was then placed in a Microcat Bait boat and positioned in the correct spots……no favouritism was given to any one specific rod.

The middle rod of the 3 had the correctly coloured rig material for the silt.

My first action was on my right hand rod…..with Gravel brown Supa natural and a sand lead. This turned out to be a bream. I repositioned the rig and my next fish fell to the middle rod. A nice 10lb ghost carp!

I had to wait around 9 hours until my next run which came again to the middle rod and a much better fish of 21lb 3oz. To make sure all was fair I rebaited and positioned all 3 rods at the point of capture on any one of the 3.

A tench of 6lb then fell to the left hand rod (green materials). Then another run on the middle rod followed some 2 hours later in the dark! A 14lb mirror graced the net.

Now some people may argue that the rig material makes absolutely no difference to catch results in the dark.

Well this experiment kind of blows that out of the water as on the second night of fishing I took no less than 11 fish on the middle rod including a new Venue PB of 30lb 5oz! And guess what? Not a sniff from a carp on the other rods!

If that’s not enough proof of the effect of camouflaging  and just spending a little more time and effort on our rigs then I don’t know what else is!

Give it a go…….I think you’ll see what I mean!

Tight lines

Keith

Nuts about Carp