How To Hair Rig Maggots

The Medusa Rig

I was looking through the search engine logs on Anglers' Net and realised that quite a few people wanted to hair rig maggots, but had no idea how to do this. It's Sunday afternoon and I have to be round a friend's in ten minutes, so here's a VERY quick guide to one method of achieving this....

Now, I have actually used a baiting needle to thread maggots directly onto a hair before, but find that it often kills most of the maggots quickly and doesn't give the best presentation.

One way that I was shown to hair rig maggots, years ago, was the aptly named 'Medusa Rig'.

To do this, you need a small piece of cork, a bottle of superglue, a few maggots and a bit of spare time on your hands. Most people will use a cork ball, but as you'll see from this photo, any piece of cork will do.

Quite simply, you don't hair rig the maggots at all. It's the cork that gets hair-rigged. You place a small blob of Superglue onto the cork and then hold two or three maggots at a time, fat end against the cork, onto the wet glue. It dries surprisingly quickly and you repeat as necessay.

The result is a wriggling mass of maggot 'snakes', hence the Medusa Rig title, which many fish find irresistible.

The smell of the maggots seems to overpower any smell from the glue, but dip the whole thing in a glug or boilie dip if you're at all worried. With a hole pierced through, I'm sure a fair bit soaks right into the cork, too.

Now, hair-rig the cork as you would a boilie. A few maggots might fall off, but it's no big deal.

If you're planning to used hair-rigged maggots a lot, it pays to have two or three Medusas on the go at once. As this is a bait that requires a lot of attention when making it, it's probably best suited to anglers fishing with bite alarms.

So, there you have it – a simple way to hair rig maggots for carp, barbel and just about any species. In fact, I'm struggling to think of a fish that doesn't like maggots.

Oh, and by the way, you don't have to use cork. If you want a less buoyant bait, you can use just about anything to hand you can drill a hole through.

Tight lines!