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LEADERS by Keith Moors
Right, where do I start? This is obviously going to have anglers who are strongly encamped on both side of the leaders argument. Hopefully I can complete it with sensible facts and suggestions that may make, even a few people stop and think before tying rigs with unnecessary pieces of equipment that can potentially make their rigs more dangerous than they need to be. I totally understand and agree that there will always be a certain amount of risk to the carp whenever we cast any rig in an attempt to try and catch them but I also believe that we are now finding more and more reasons to try to minimize these risks whenever possible. I also believe that this subject is coming to light now because we are all continuing to learn the “rights” and “wrongs” of carp angling as it develops. We have gone through a list of “accepted” ways of fishing only to eventually realise that we could be putting the fish at risk and to develop better ways of fishing. During the early days it was common to see carp being kept in keepnets but now this is frowned upon. Similarly we no longer use fixed leads and this is another area which needs more examination to improve. Sacks, landing nets, injury treatments and many other small items show that we continue to consider and change where necessary in order to improve the way we look after our quarry and these changes need to continue.
I don’t want anyone to think that I am preaching from a “whiter than white” pulpit so I would just like to give you some background to my fishing which may help to explain how I have now arrived at this point. I started carp fishing in June 1967 using very basic rigs and as my carp fishing progressed so did my enthusiasm to try new approaches in order to “fool” the bigger residents of whichever lake that I was fishing. This series of developments eventually led me to begin trying lead core as a leader sometime during the early nineties. It wasn’t nearly as available then and my first batch was on a huge spool from America which I seem to remember was called “Kerplunk.” It was originally for deep water trolling and had bands of different colours for every 10 metres so that the “troller” could see how deep he was working his lures. I even went to the trouble of dyeing it to more friendly colours and used it for most of my fishing for many years. To illustrate just how much I valued lead core I even “invented” my own knot in order to “be able to use it more safely” and even now if you Google “Keith Moors Knot” you will find a series of diagrams showing how to tie it. It was not for fish welfare reasons that I stopped using it but simply because I found that it didn’t actually do what I thought that it should. It was immediately obvious that it was not heavy enough and too stiff to follow all but the smoothest of lake beds. I began fishing a very clear lake and had lowered my rig, complete with braided hook link, into the margins to test the presentation. The margins were about two feet deep and I am over six feet and even from that range the rig was patently obvious. What became even more evident as I knelt down to examine it further was that the lead core didn’t follow the lake contours but simply laid from mini-peak to mini-peak leaving this obvious length of “cord” sticking out like a sore thumb.
I immediately changed to a very basic rig and began catching better than before so had no need to revert to using lead core again. However it was always something that remained in my tackle box for future use if needed so I hadn’t immediately become anti-lead core. In late 2001 I sold up in England and bought a house with its own lake in France which we opened in 2002 as a fishery for English anglers. This is not an advertisement so I won’t even name my fishery but it is from this point on that I began to discover that rigs don’t always act as we expect. It became evident very early on that not all anglers had managed to interpret the published rig details in the correct manner and I was to find some astonishing rigs being used. They ranged from lead core with swivels at both ends, which the anglers struggled to understand how they could be death rigs, to helicopter rigs with knots in the leader above the top swivel “because the hook link keeps flying up the leader on the cast.” I then began to find carp towing leaders around but initially each time this happened it was a badly made rig which was found to be the cause so I simply thought that more education was necessary. I think that the big difference was simply because I was living on the lake every day so I was seeing virtually every mistake or unpleasant situation whereas as an angler your views are more or less confined to your own swim and then only for your time at the lake. For all of the days in between your trips anything could be happening without you being aware.
My first really disturbing discovery was a mid twenty mirror which was towing a bunch of small sticks and weed around. The sticks etc were wrapped up in a length of lead core. There was no lead attached. The lead had been shed as it should but the lead core had still managed to wrap itself around the sticks and these had then been dragged through the weed thereby increasing the amount of snag being towed. Luckily the fish was relatively unharmed but, probably because of the weight of the lead core, it couldn’t shed the hook. It was released and in all honesty I didn’t really give it too many more thoughts and believed that it was a chance in a million that that situation could arise and it would be just a “one-off”. However, over the next few years I found another six examples of exactly the same situation and it got worse. Of the seven carp found towing just a length of lead core (I did find other carp towing rigs but these were victims of bad angling so don’t form part of this debate) all of them had managed to wind it around sticks, roots or weed but only four of them could be released unharmed. One of them (a mid thirty common) had ripped the left hand side of its mouth so badly that it has now been nicknamed “The Pipesmoker.” Another (an upper thirty mirror) had to be re-homed because its mouth was so badly deformed that it would never again be able to eat large food items. The tear in its mouth was so bad that one of its barbules had turned in and was now permanently inside its mouth. My only choices were to find somewhere where it would no longer be fished for or to kill it. The last (an upper twenty mirror) was found towing a very large ball of weed. I must admit that I managed to snag the weed and wind in the fish so as to release it like all the others but found a terrible picture which will live with me forever. The pressure from dragging the weed ball had snapped its bottom jaw, leaving the jaw hanging against its “chest” and I was left with the sad job of killing it and burying it. Obviously, as any fishery owner facing this situation would have done, I immediately banned lead core on my lake but I also wanted to know why these fish had become snagged.
I carried out several tests and found some worrying characteristics. It was obvious that lead core was totally different to most other materials that we use and it was much more easily kinked than any other plus it could have the ability to allow some of the core to poke out through the sheath on occasions. I made some casts in our field to try to get some clues and these were my findings.
Upon the compression of a big cast the lead core is stretched but on landing the sheath relaxes more than the core. A couple more casts and the core can then snap and one end of the snap can poke out through the sheath. Obviously this can become an obstruction to prevent a bead sliding off but even more worrying is that the position of this break in the core also becomes a “hinge” which allows the sheath to fold easily at that point. If the “hinged” length of lead core is pulled around a small branch it folds easily and will then allow itself to be completely wrapped around the stick and once a full turn is achieved it simply gets tighter and tighter.
It is my belief that the most dangerous rig is the one left out in the lake after a casting crack off because I noticed in my casting tests that, if I wound the rig back in after the cast, the pressure of pulling it would straighten it out. Probably the act of playing a fish would have the same effect. However, if I walked out to where my lead had landed and examined the rig it had occasionally “crumpled” and had kinks and twists within its length. Now a carp picking up one of these crumpled rigs would easily be heading into trouble. I am fairly confident that hooked carp head for snags and weed beds in an attempt to “rub” the hook free from their mouths, which is probably why they are so proficient at transferring hooks to weed stems. however with the inherent weight and roughness of lead core it drags down into the base of any weed bed or snag and beds in more easily than a length of mono would. Add to this the kinks and twists and it then becomes easy to see that any carp which feels the tension from this material may start twisting and turning in order to get rid of this encumbrance and simply makes matters worse and worse.
Having said all of the above as a reason not to use lead core I am also now aware of the dangers of all leaders. Simon Crow’s pictures of the carp that he was unfortunate enough to pull in fixed to a fused leader give testament to the fact that even a small “adjustment” to any rig can result in a dead carp. I accept that the bead in this case had been turned through ninety degrees and had been pierced “across” the hole but I have seen this suggested in the magazines on several occasions as a solution to stop the beads slipping on the cast. In short it can’t be blamed solely against that particular angler as Simon even said that the top bead slid off easily when he tried it but that even this leader had managed to kink.
Personally I feel that we should all take this opportunity to ensure that we minimize the risk as much as possible and try our hardest to use the safest rig possible for each fishing situation. I will put my hands up and admit that I use leaders when I fish the river Saone. The river bed is so severe that I would suffer numerous cut-offs if I didn’t but I use them in a way that puts the “week link” as close to the hook as possible. My set up is 55 lb braided main line with a casting leader of 110 lb braid to withstand my need to cast 5 to 8 ounce leads. I then add a 30 lb fluoro leader of about 5 feet with my lead attached via a large eye swivel as a running rig and the whole lot is completed by the use of an 18 lb Ghost hook link. My belief is that any break should be at the hook link swivel and this fact should leave the carp with very little to get rid of.
When fishing my lake I use a light lead running rig without any leader or tubing based on the same principal as above. I even now use the Enterprise “snag-safe” system which allows me to shed the lead even on a running rig. If a snap does occur it should be fairly close to the hook. I have heard some anglers suggest that even my rigs aren’t totally safe because I could still suffer a cut off close to the rod and the carp will be left towing a length of mono. I agree that this is a possibility but exactly the same could happen with a leader and then the carp is left towing a length of mono AND a leader. I would reiterate that all it takes is for each of us to stop, before we cast out, and ask “do I really need to tie on a leader?” If it isn’t needed why use it? You may actually find, as my friends and I have, that your catch rate improves without it. After all why go to all the trouble of choosing the best main line so that the carp can’t see it and then tie on a length of material which is three or four times the diameter so that the carp can spot it more easily?
If this article just gets a few more anglers thinking about fish welfare then it will have been well worthwhile.
Be lucky.
Keith Moors.
Right, where do I start? This is obviously going to have anglers who are strongly encamped on both side of the leaders argument. Hopefully I can complete it with sensible facts and suggestions that may make, even a few people stop and think before tying rigs with unnecessary pieces of equipment that can potentially make their rigs more dangerous than they need to be. I totally understand and agree that there will always be a certain amount of risk to the carp whenever we cast any rig in an attempt to try and catch them but I also believe that we are now finding more and more reasons to try to minimize these risks whenever possible. I also believe that this subject is coming to light now because we are all continuing to learn the “rights” and “wrongs” of carp angling as it develops. We have gone through a list of “accepted” ways of fishing only to eventually realise that we could be putting the fish at risk and to develop better ways of fishing. During the early days it was common to see carp being kept in keepnets but now this is frowned upon. Similarly we no longer use fixed leads and this is another area which needs more examination to improve. Sacks, landing nets, injury treatments and many other small items show that we continue to consider and change where necessary in order to improve the way we look after our quarry and these changes need to continue.
I don’t want anyone to think that I am preaching from a “whiter than white” pulpit so I would just like to give you some background to my fishing which may help to explain how I have now arrived at this point. I started carp fishing in June 1967 using very basic rigs and as my carp fishing progressed so did my enthusiasm to try new approaches in order to “fool” the bigger residents of whichever lake that I was fishing. This series of developments eventually led me to begin trying lead core as a leader sometime during the early nineties. It wasn’t nearly as available then and my first batch was on a huge spool from America which I seem to remember was called “Kerplunk.” It was originally for deep water trolling and had bands of different colours for every 10 metres so that the “troller” could see how deep he was working his lures. I even went to the trouble of dyeing it to more friendly colours and used it for most of my fishing for many years. To illustrate just how much I valued lead core I even “invented” my own knot in order to “be able to use it more safely” and even now if you Google “Keith Moors Knot” you will find a series of diagrams showing how to tie it. It was not for fish welfare reasons that I stopped using it but simply because I found that it didn’t actually do what I thought that it should. It was immediately obvious that it was not heavy enough and too stiff to follow all but the smoothest of lake beds. I began fishing a very clear lake and had lowered my rig, complete with braided hook link, into the margins to test the presentation. The margins were about two feet deep and I am over six feet and even from that range the rig was patently obvious. What became even more evident as I knelt down to examine it further was that the lead core didn’t follow the lake contours but simply laid from mini-peak to mini-peak leaving this obvious length of “cord” sticking out like a sore thumb.
I immediately changed to a very basic rig and began catching better than before so had no need to revert to using lead core again. However it was always something that remained in my tackle box for future use if needed so I hadn’t immediately become anti-lead core. In late 2001 I sold up in England and bought a house with its own lake in France which we opened in 2002 as a fishery for English anglers. This is not an advertisement so I won’t even name my fishery but it is from this point on that I began to discover that rigs don’t always act as we expect. It became evident very early on that not all anglers had managed to interpret the published rig details in the correct manner and I was to find some astonishing rigs being used. They ranged from lead core with swivels at both ends, which the anglers struggled to understand how they could be death rigs, to helicopter rigs with knots in the leader above the top swivel “because the hook link keeps flying up the leader on the cast.” I then began to find carp towing leaders around but initially each time this happened it was a badly made rig which was found to be the cause so I simply thought that more education was necessary. I think that the big difference was simply because I was living on the lake every day so I was seeing virtually every mistake or unpleasant situation whereas as an angler your views are more or less confined to your own swim and then only for your time at the lake. For all of the days in between your trips anything could be happening without you being aware.
My first really disturbing discovery was a mid twenty mirror which was towing a bunch of small sticks and weed around. The sticks etc were wrapped up in a length of lead core. There was no lead attached. The lead had been shed as it should but the lead core had still managed to wrap itself around the sticks and these had then been dragged through the weed thereby increasing the amount of snag being towed. Luckily the fish was relatively unharmed but, probably because of the weight of the lead core, it couldn’t shed the hook. It was released and in all honesty I didn’t really give it too many more thoughts and believed that it was a chance in a million that that situation could arise and it would be just a “one-off”. However, over the next few years I found another six examples of exactly the same situation and it got worse. Of the seven carp found towing just a length of lead core (I did find other carp towing rigs but these were victims of bad angling so don’t form part of this debate) all of them had managed to wind it around sticks, roots or weed but only four of them could be released unharmed. One of them (a mid thirty common) had ripped the left hand side of its mouth so badly that it has now been nicknamed “The Pipesmoker.” Another (an upper thirty mirror) had to be re-homed because its mouth was so badly deformed that it would never again be able to eat large food items. The tear in its mouth was so bad that one of its barbules had turned in and was now permanently inside its mouth. My only choices were to find somewhere where it would no longer be fished for or to kill it. The last (an upper twenty mirror) was found towing a very large ball of weed. I must admit that I managed to snag the weed and wind in the fish so as to release it like all the others but found a terrible picture which will live with me forever. The pressure from dragging the weed ball had snapped its bottom jaw, leaving the jaw hanging against its “chest” and I was left with the sad job of killing it and burying it. Obviously, as any fishery owner facing this situation would have done, I immediately banned lead core on my lake but I also wanted to know why these fish had become snagged.
I carried out several tests and found some worrying characteristics. It was obvious that lead core was totally different to most other materials that we use and it was much more easily kinked than any other plus it could have the ability to allow some of the core to poke out through the sheath on occasions. I made some casts in our field to try to get some clues and these were my findings.
Upon the compression of a big cast the lead core is stretched but on landing the sheath relaxes more than the core. A couple more casts and the core can then snap and one end of the snap can poke out through the sheath. Obviously this can become an obstruction to prevent a bead sliding off but even more worrying is that the position of this break in the core also becomes a “hinge” which allows the sheath to fold easily at that point. If the “hinged” length of lead core is pulled around a small branch it folds easily and will then allow itself to be completely wrapped around the stick and once a full turn is achieved it simply gets tighter and tighter.
It is my belief that the most dangerous rig is the one left out in the lake after a casting crack off because I noticed in my casting tests that, if I wound the rig back in after the cast, the pressure of pulling it would straighten it out. Probably the act of playing a fish would have the same effect. However, if I walked out to where my lead had landed and examined the rig it had occasionally “crumpled” and had kinks and twists within its length. Now a carp picking up one of these crumpled rigs would easily be heading into trouble. I am fairly confident that hooked carp head for snags and weed beds in an attempt to “rub” the hook free from their mouths, which is probably why they are so proficient at transferring hooks to weed stems. however with the inherent weight and roughness of lead core it drags down into the base of any weed bed or snag and beds in more easily than a length of mono would. Add to this the kinks and twists and it then becomes easy to see that any carp which feels the tension from this material may start twisting and turning in order to get rid of this encumbrance and simply makes matters worse and worse.
Having said all of the above as a reason not to use lead core I am also now aware of the dangers of all leaders. Simon Crow’s pictures of the carp that he was unfortunate enough to pull in fixed to a fused leader give testament to the fact that even a small “adjustment” to any rig can result in a dead carp. I accept that the bead in this case had been turned through ninety degrees and had been pierced “across” the hole but I have seen this suggested in the magazines on several occasions as a solution to stop the beads slipping on the cast. In short it can’t be blamed solely against that particular angler as Simon even said that the top bead slid off easily when he tried it but that even this leader had managed to kink.
Personally I feel that we should all take this opportunity to ensure that we minimize the risk as much as possible and try our hardest to use the safest rig possible for each fishing situation. I will put my hands up and admit that I use leaders when I fish the river Saone. The river bed is so severe that I would suffer numerous cut-offs if I didn’t but I use them in a way that puts the “week link” as close to the hook as possible. My set up is 55 lb braided main line with a casting leader of 110 lb braid to withstand my need to cast 5 to 8 ounce leads. I then add a 30 lb fluoro leader of about 5 feet with my lead attached via a large eye swivel as a running rig and the whole lot is completed by the use of an 18 lb Ghost hook link. My belief is that any break should be at the hook link swivel and this fact should leave the carp with very little to get rid of.
When fishing my lake I use a light lead running rig without any leader or tubing based on the same principal as above. I even now use the Enterprise “snag-safe” system which allows me to shed the lead even on a running rig. If a snap does occur it should be fairly close to the hook. I have heard some anglers suggest that even my rigs aren’t totally safe because I could still suffer a cut off close to the rod and the carp will be left towing a length of mono. I agree that this is a possibility but exactly the same could happen with a leader and then the carp is left towing a length of mono AND a leader. I would reiterate that all it takes is for each of us to stop, before we cast out, and ask “do I really need to tie on a leader?” If it isn’t needed why use it? You may actually find, as my friends and I have, that your catch rate improves without it. After all why go to all the trouble of choosing the best main line so that the carp can’t see it and then tie on a length of material which is three or four times the diameter so that the carp can spot it more easily?
If this article just gets a few more anglers thinking about fish welfare then it will have been well worthwhile.
Be lucky.
Keith Moors.
