How To Make Yours A Lot Longer

I moved house a few months ago, and was puzzled when I received the estate agent’s details, which stated that my rear garden was around 100′ in length. A quick check with a surveyor’s tape showed the true length to be 216′ from back door to back fence. (I have framed the house details, as they are the only recorded evidence of an estate agent underestimating the size of anything).

As I stood by the back door winding in the tape I realized that the back fence was 72 yards away (lightning mental arithmetic!) and that it would need a bloody good cast to reach it.

A beach caster prepares for the big one

In the past I have always been amused by the distance some anglers think they are achieving. Invariably anglers are casting loaded swimfeeders ’70-80 yards’, carp fishermen are all ‘casting to gravel bars 120 yards away’, pike anglers are ‘having to put mackerel tails over 100 yards’ and one delightful chap I was talking to on the Thames one day was fishing his 2BB waggler at 75 yards! (We were standing on the bank at Marlow, but he was obviously fishing a swim in Maidenhead).

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Carp and Pike anglers – can you afford not to buy the new ‘Horizon Shrinker’ system, guaranteed to put 50 yards on your best cast?

It is nigh on impossible to tell how far you have cast over water, but if you want to know how to cast further – read on…….

I promise the advertisement is not too good to be true – but you may not be able to take it on board! First, the system is too cheap for ‘serious anglers’ at less than £ 200 for both rod and reel. At that price it obviously can’t be any good! Second, the rod will only have five rings and will be labelled ‘beachcaster’ and the reel will be a multiplier.

At this point many will think I am mad/stupid/taking the piss, but please stay with me. If a sport’s goods manufacturer claims it has produced a golf ball which will travel an extra twenty yards off the tee, they wake up next morning with a queue of golfers round the block, waving fistfuls of ten pound notes begging for this new ‘miracle’.

We coarse fishermen have the technology available to significantly increase our casting distance, but choose to ignore it. Carp and pike anglers are always striving for longer casts, with modern ‘distance’ rods and ‘big pit’ reels putting 125 yards within reach. But beach anglers are able to put sea baits out to over 175 yards, and I am sure they could do it just as easily with a boilie/stringer, PVA bag, mackerel tail or sprat/3oz lead.

Beachcasting rods are helpfully marked with the casting weights, ie, 4 – 6ozs, 6 – 8ozs, etc, so simple that even I can grasp what that means. Seems so much easier than ‘2.75lb TC, fast taper, SIC rings, abbreviated Duplon handle, 125yds (oh really!) and nice graphics!’ – “£ 199, thank you sir!” Yes, it says 125 yards on the label, but that doesn’t mean your best cast is going to be 125 yards long.

Conventional pike rods But they won’t cast as far as a beachcaster rod

Some time ago I was on a distance ‘thing’ whilst pike fishing. I am fairly proficient at rod-building so I experimented with through-action, thin wall, thick wall, fast taper, 2.5 – 3.5 lb TC etc, etc. I finally found a Conoflex blank lurking at the back of a tackle shop which had a parallel butt, blindingly fast taper, and said 4oz on the label (shock-horror – a beachcasting blank!). I ringed it up and went pike fishing, using a multiplier (more shock-horror) I had recently started using the ‘mangle’ for pike fishing. Reason one was line capacity, reason two was to stop cutting my index finger open because of line slippage and reason three was that I was occasionally suffering ‘premature bail arm closure’ – and we all know what that feels like!

I was regularly able to achieve distances in excess of one hundred yards with mackerel half-baits of up to 6ozs in weight. I will qualify the 100 yard cast by saying that on a couple of occasions I have spooled on 100m of line plus a 25′ shock leader (essential) and have seen the knot joining the new line to the backing go out through the tip ring. I was regularly putting baits 30 – 40 yards further than the other anglers around me, and that’s when I first encountered tackle prejudice.

One day a fellow piker wandered over after I had just completed a cast, and firstly complimented me on the distance. He then stared at the rod and reel combination and started to shake his head. As I was experimenting with spacing, the rod rings were secured with perhaps 5 or 6 turns of whipping, the Fuji reel seat was similarly fixed on the butt section, and of course the blank wasn’t varnished. There was genuine disgust in his voice when he announced, “You’re using ******* sea fishing gear, and look at the state of it! You should get some proper tackle and then you would be able to cast even further!” With that he wandered off to tell his mates all about it, and I could hear the laughter from 60 yards away.

During the course of the day I had two runs and one pike, which was two runs and one pike more than my new ‘friend’ and his four companions managed between them. I reasoned that the pike were not able to discern what was on the other end of the line to the mackerel tail, so it didn’t matter to them whether it cost £ 20 or £ 200.

Enough moral waffle, why can’t rod manufacturers just re-model their beachcasting rods to suit us pike/carp anglers, rather than trying to continually upgrade the coarse rods to what eventually must almost be the same blank? And how about marking coarse rods with casting weights – we accept it quite happily on spinning rods, why not on carp/pike rods? Surely any manufacturer who was brave enough to do just that and launch a new rod capable of casting 175 yards (at half the price of current long distance rods, as most beachcasters seem to be) would be struggling to keep up with demand. Or have I got it all back to front, and they are selling us remodelled beachcasters as distance rods, but charging twice the price! They wouldn’t do that – would they?

Why don’t more coarse anglers use a multiplier?

As to reels, the majority of beachcasters use multipliers because they are better suited to distance casting. The line comes straight off the spool, there is no line ‘slap’ when casting, and they have far greater winching power than a fixed spool reel. Modern multipliers have magnetic braking systems which make it far easier to cast than the old days, when you had to play with your blocks (some of us still like to!) So carp and pike anglers, what is the problem? We can customize the rod blanks so nobody can see it was once a beachcaster, but using a multiplier is going to be difficult to disguise. Perhaps Fox or Wychwood can make a trendy camouflaged bag you can put over the reel, with a small (Teflon coated, of course!) aperture for the line to exit, so nobody need know – least of all the fish.

So there you have it, the perfect solution to long range casting, available now, relatively cheap, and no carp or pike angler will bother – or will they? Is it not beyond the realms of possibility that the Pike Anglers Club or Carp Society might not invite a proficient beachcaster to a field somewhere and watch in amazement as he hurls their clipped up boilies/PVA bags/sprats/mackerel, whatever, towards the horizon, or should I just up my dosage and go back to dreamland?