do you hair rig your baits ?

[moonlight angler]

so how many of you wise ones hair rig your baits?

 

also what about hair rigging for Bream. you dont see many people do that with corn etc

[benacre]

Hair rigged plastic sweetcorn caught me two Bream and a Mirror Carp on my local River on Saturday.

 

I use hair rigs for 90% of my fishing now.

[wayne baker]

Only really boillys. if i go carp fishing. I tend to hair rig pellets and meat for barbel only if i feel they may be finicky. But most of my barbeling is done on quite a low pressured stretch of river. So i done really need to be to subtle.

A lot of guys these days use plastics and there great for hair rigging. Providing the hook lenghs stays good order and the hook stays sharp you can use it all day.

[Dick Dastardly]

Depends on the bait,the species and the situation.The hair isnt the be all and end all to all situations.In fact its often misused by people who have been brought up purely on carp fishing and know no other way.

[Dales]

I often hair rig many baits. Pellets, Boilies, Meat, Nuts, Hemp and its my favourite way of fishing corn. 3 or 4 bits go nice on a hair and form a big bait for Carp and they seem to love it.

 

All most all my other baits, the softer stuff worms, cockles, maggots, bread etc go straight on the hook and some times I may even try a bit of corn direct to the hook.

[Anderoo]

For smaller bream I wouldn't bother, except if I was using a bait too hard to hook. For the bigger ones I do use hairs as a matter of course, but that's because I caught one like that and now I'm too scared to change anything

[BoldBear]

It depends on the bait and whether the fish are playng with it or taking it confidently.

I usually use a hair rig when I'm Carp fishing however not always and it depends on the bait.

For Barbel fishing I only use a hair for pellets or firm meat where I suspect that the hook doesn''t easily pull through the bait very easily.

 

last week I watched a shoal of large chub with their huge cavernous mouths in a clear shallow stream that I fish picking off the occasional loose piece of luncheonmeat from the gravel which was thrown in by the angler upstream. The chub would pick up the cube of meat in its lips and dart off to the side of the stream away from the rest of the shoal with the meat still visible in its lips and only then would it spit out the meat and suck it back into its mouth again to swallow it and then return to the shoal.

 

When they are feeding like this then a hair wouldn't do the job it was intended for and you would miss a lot of takes, probably with the sort of bite that bends your quivertip right round without ever hooking anything. whereas a hook buried into the meat with the point exposed would stand more chance of hooking the Chub.

 

So a hair isn't always the best method to use.

Edited August 19, 2009 by BoldBear

[Worms]

I must try a hair-rigged fly next time I go fly fishing............

[Andy Macfarlane]

I hair-rig corn all the time. I reckon 5-6 pieces of corn is hard to pass up.

 

The same with 7-8 4mm soft hook pellets. The same hair should cover both. BTW, I have tried with 6mm pellets and I haven't had nearly the same success. The string of pellets looks like a skinny brown worm but it's absolutely humming. Have the pellets side by side but don't have them on the hair so tight that the string has a rigidity. It should be limp and floppy, so it's sucked up easily from any angle.

Edited August 19, 2009 by Andy Macfarlane

[wellyphant]

so how many of you wise ones hair rig your baits?

 

also what about hair rigging for Bream. you dont see many people do that with corn etc

I use hair rigs most of the time exept when i'm float fishing or legering with worms,maggots and fishbaits for pike.I've won alot of club matches using hair rigs when everyone else was using traditional methods,one of them was won with 20lb+ of bream using sweetcorn and very recently 30lb+ of carp hair rigging various kinds of pellets and boilies.Some might say hair rigging takes some of the skill out of angling because with it being a self hooking rig you don't have to strike.I can see their point but ever since i started using hair rigging my catch rate increased dramatically,it's a very effective method.