Do you check your rigs?

I dont mean just looking over them to see if the swivel is ok, the line untangled, and the hook not bent or blunted. I mean, do you check to see if the rigs actually do what you think they aught to?

A while ago I was at a Barbel Society "do", fronted by a well known angling personallity, where he showed a new hook range due to come out from one of his sponsors.
The rigs tied with those hooks really looked the buisness.
I didnt buy the hooks, but I did accept the basic idea behind them, and I went home with a resolve to try to do a similar form of presentation.
Not to put too fine a point on it I have been using this style of hook all this Winter and early Spring.
However yesterday I needed to tie up some more of the hooklinks, and it was only after I had tied up a few, that I thought to actually check the rig underwater, seeing as I had a bucket of pre-drilled pellets to hand.

Boy am I glad that I did!

After a few tries, up to my forearms in the bath, I discovered that what I thought was a faithful copy of the rig was not in fact working as well as I thought it should. In fact it was pretty rubbish, only hooking up in about 50% of the tries.
That got my attention very quickly.
Put this way, I have caught fish steadily, but not exceptionally well this Winter. Which I have put down to a combination of the variable weather and a new water.
But if the rig was rubbish ? Hmmmm.

Now I am busting my little grey cells, to work out how I can improve the tieing of the rig, and make it work correctly.
Several things have come to mind, and will be tried out in due course. But if I hadn't thought to give those rigs a try, and just plodded on through the next few weeks? What a potential waste that could have been.

So give your rigs a try in the sink or the bath, and see how they perform, with a bait attached, you may get a bit of a surprise.

BOF ;)

Rig test update.10/5/08

A full week has gone by, and several hours of testing has resulted in the scrapping of all the "new" rigs.
None of the ways of tying the hooks that I tried worked as well as they should. Almost, but not quite, and I will not accept "near enough" these days, (not that I was ever that bad really).
Well, except for a few casts after returning from the "Onion Bargee", (aka the Horse and Barge at Harefield), late on. :rolleyes:
But maybe more on that some other day.
However if you are not confident that your rigs work as they should, it works like a corrosive on your confidence as a whole.
So much so, in my case, that it would be pointless keeping on with the hooks for the sake of a few quid.
Now I have the fun task of scrapping all the rigs (c 30 or so), and salvaging the swivels in preparation for retying all of them. :angry:

BOF ;)

What a tedious job that was, and there are still more to do, I have just realised. There is a whole rig wallet full in the big rucksack that I use for my long sessions.
Oh F...un! NOT ! <_<

BOF ;)