Every once in a while you stumble across something and think ‘Why didn’t i think of that’!

Well, I have done just that. Reading through the excellent Sixth British Carp Study Group book I stumbled across a article by Lancashire member Les Watts where he descibed his marker float set up.

Now this is simplicity itself and I have now adopted the same technique and really can’t see how I ever managed before.

You must have been in the situation when feature finding and suddenly you find a real interesting area only to find the float won’t pop-up. Nine times out of ten you have pulled it just that fraction too far and it’s jammed in weed. Try as you might you can’t find that spot again as a few yards either way can look very similar over water without a mark in place.

Similarly you pull up the side of a plateaux, drag it along for a bit before finding it trundling back down the near side. You are never really sure how wide the plateaux was without lots more casting.

Well Les’s simple trick sorts out these and many other situations. He had the bright idea of loading his marker reels with white Dynon 3000 braid then simply marked his line at regular intervals with his own code so he could see exactly how far out these features are and how wide they are even if his float wouldn’t rise.

I finally got around to emulating this method last week and I really can’t believe how useful it has become already I feel I wouldn’t go back to using a marker line with no marks.

I simply placed two posts in the ground 5m apart then wraped my line around these adding marks as I went.

I used a waterproof black permanent marker pen which shows up real well against the white line.

At 5m I put a 1 1/2cm line with the pen. At 10m a 3cm line. 15m 1 x 3cm and 1 x 1 1/2cm. 20m 2 x 3cm marks, 25m and 2 x 3cm and 1 x 1 1/2cm mark and so on. You can develop your own system but this one worked fine for me.

Another thing this has come in handy for is straight lead work without the float in place. There are times I don’t really want to drag a float through the swim so I am able to cast a dumpy lead out on its own and pull back carefully feeling for features. Once something is logged it is a simple job to count the black lines to indicate the distance then walk the line out on the bank until you hit the correct mark then walk your baited rig to the same distance. Job done effortlessly.

Best fishes, Shaun

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