devonian

I have 11 okumas and some of them i have had and used for ten years, i have never, ever had a problem with any of them. The Epix is as good as anything twice as expensive and the cheaper reels knock other bottom end reels for six. Don't get me wrong i have a couple of diawa reels and a shimano and there is nothing wrong with them either, its just i hate the barely concealed snobbery that bubbles up everytime the word okuma is mentioned.

How do investing in decent drop offs and alarms improve the welfare of the fish??? I would say that the opposite is true.

I can tell you whats helped the modern day carper the most, having little muddy puddles stuffed full of carp that are so hungry they jump into their keep nets.

Yes your right but it will always be the same since carp fishing is not an in depth science. A lot of it will always come down to the presenter. You take someone like Jack Hargreaves who could make any subject under the sun seem interesting seemingly at will and compare it with someone like Matt Hayes, Hargreaves was so down to earth and easy to listen to you felt he was talking just to you and you alone. Matt for all the fact he is a nice guy comes across as an egosentric who is telling us how great he is. One bloke i think deserves a program of his own is Mick Brown who is about the nearest we have to a modern hargreaves style presenter. Maybe given his pike and zander preferences he would have made a better front man for "Predators".

Lets also hope that greenie is better then when he presented that other pile of drivel "predators" He is better known as a carp angler so fingers crossed.

Lets hope its better then the crap we have had to endure over the last few years. Jan Porter fawning and gushing over his "guests" talking in that hushed monotone voice didn,t exactly set a hard act to follow.

Hair rigged they are great for carp, use em like boilies one and a half is a good way. I always put a short piece of rig tube on my needle and pull the hair and the tube into the meatball which helps stop the hair cutting through the meat.

Each to there own of course but i can only heap praise on badger for coming up with an excellent piece of kit for a far cheaper price then you,d pay elsewhere. Had one for a couple of months and its always worked and performed really well. Are we really trying to say that Pro-cats are 100% reliable? is anything? My badger baitboat is....................so far!!

I agree with everything you say mate and if you actually read what i wrote instead of reacting to just one bit of it then you would see that. My point is that the inference that bait boats reduce the skill level but other inovations ,such as the hair rig and the bite alarm do not is crap. As for watercraft i would suggest that the average match angler knows more about watercraft then the average carper does. (sweeping statement??)

Peter I am not saying i am against hair rigs or any other type of self hooking rig but your philosophy regarding the erosian of skill levels does. The over-riding point of all "new" (rehashed) rigs is to a. fool the fish into picking up the bait and b. make sure the fish cannot eject the hook without hooking itself. there by reducing a huge amount of the skill factor. That is all modern session carping is about that and time to burn. Day session guys NEED to think things out far more then long stay anglers. There would be no long stay anglers without the hair rig, the bite alarms and the boilies and the other inovations that have moved things on. I have a bait boat but i rarely use it, in fact i only use it on one lake i fish which is fringed on one side with overhanging trees. I don,t want to leave tackle hanging in the trees to harm other wild life but i do want to fish over there. So i use a bait boat, silly thing is that most of the anti bait boat brigade would not bat an eyelid if i rowed across in a boat and placed my baits and freebies, that is hypocracy! plain and simple!!

Your third paragraph if taken seriously would surly mean that the hair rig and all other self hooking rigs are by your own definition a" drop down the ladder of achievment" and "taking the easier less skilfull route" Surely you should be sat watching a float or touch ledgering since this requires that YOU and not the terminal tackle do the hooking,after all what more basic skill is there in fishing then hooking a fish.

Zenith there are people out there who would rip your balls off and fry em in front of you if they thought there was somthing in it for them. Internet scams are on the increase and speaking as somone who has been caught myself i sympothise with you Chris.

Similar thing happened to me beefy when i caught my first twenty. The wife took the photos with a 35mm slr set in auto mode which set the light to film speed but she did not focus it. so when i got the prints back (pre digital) they were blurred to buggery.Bottom line though is you know you caught it and thats all that really matters. No image is as sharp as the minds eye, when i think back to that day i can still remember every moment of the fight and exactly how i felt when i watched the needle go past the magic twenty mark.

only thing i would/do differently to that which andrew has so elequently described is to put the rubber ring on the bag and roll it down tight to the bait Before i put the weight in the bag. It is a lot easier rolling the ring onto the weight up over the bag then trying to feed the bag into the ring whilst rolling the ring down the weight.

Hi vigiles Some good fishing in devon but a lot of muddy carp holes as well. Newton abbott angling club have a lot of excellent waters of various sizes and also Plymouth and district Course angling club. http://www.padcac.co.uk/ will give you lots of info about them as well as links to the clubs other two websites. Devonian