8 Ways to Improve your Zig Fishing this Spring!

As with all Carp Fishing, location is key and fishing with Zigs is no different! With the fish still shoaled up, you will need to fish hard to locate the fish, especially as a Zig Rig involves casting out a single hookbait with little/minimal feed. 

Make sure you survey the water and look for signs of fish such as little swirls on the surface, patches of bubbles, fish showing themselves or dark shapes, and cast a rig to these signs, as bites will be almost instant. On larger venues, try and keep casting regularly on different spots. It may be busy work, but it will be worth it! 

A lot of anglers like to fish a long hooklink with a Zig Rig, but this limits you to fishing one depth, and at this time of year when the water is warming up, the layer that the carp are feeding will constantly be changing. This is where a Zig Float excels as it allows you to change depths and thoroughly explore different depths while you are fishing with Zigs without the need to reel in and change hooklinks.

There are loads of different versions on the market such as the Ridgemonkey Zyggo which have all been designed specially for Zig Fishing. Just let your line out a couple of feet and you are fishing in a completely new depth. It may not sound like much but it will help get you more bites, and it has to be seen to believed how such a small change makes such a big difference to your catch rate! 

Your lead arrangement can have a massive effect on your experience using a Zig Rig. Using a lead clip set up such as the Nash Run Lead Clip for Zigs offers several advantages over a traditional running lead or inline set up, the first is as you are using longer hooklinks, a lead clip set up will prevent the hooklink from wrapping around the mainline which would compromise your presentation. The second is that your lead can be ejected when playing a fish, as a big lead bouncing around combined with a longer hooklink has a high potential to lead to a hook pull at the net. 

Probably the most popular hookbait for Zig Rig fishing is buoyant foam. The main advantages it has over other buoyant hookbaits such as pop ups is it wil remain buoyant far longer and that it can be cut and shaped to mimic different food items that carp will be used to encountering in the upper layers.

Foam is also great at absorbing and taking on flavours and will leak flavour into the water far effectively than pop-ups massively increasing the appeal of a Zig Bait to carp 

Although the essence of a Zig Hookbait is to be visual, fish use more then just sight to locate food especially in coloured water, and this is where boosting your Zig Baits with liquids and flavours can really make a massive difference! 

By using any water or oil based liquid attractor such as Korda Goo or a bait spray, your hookbait will leave a flavour trail throughout the whole water column, widening the target area created by your hookbait. 

Using bright baits is a common tactic to increase bites when carp fishing, but for Zig Fishing, experience shows that darker hookbaits seem to be best, with one of the best hookbaits out there for Zig Fishing being simply a bit of black foam! 

As the carp are in the upper layer, they tend to approach your bait from either the side or from below, and a darker hookbait will stand out much more at this angler compared to brighter baits, as it will create a silhouette. Another possible reason for why darker baits are better would be that they more closely resemble insects and bugs that the carp tend to find in the upper layers. 

As outlined earlier in this article, you need to be busy when fishing zigs and the same approach applies to feeding, especially on higher stocked venues. To increase the likelihood of your Zig being eaten, you need to get the carp actively looking for food.

A great method for this is by preparing a Zig Mix, which consists mainly of a sloppy groundbait mix with an array of small particles and spodding it out over your rig. This mix will cloud the water and fill the upper layers with small food particles, whipping them into a feeding frenzy and making it more likely that they will pick up your Zig Hookbait! 

Although slack lines seem to be the best way to go with most carp fishing styles, with Zigs it is the opposite! As you are fishing in the upper waters, carp will not be swimming across your line behind the lead, so there is no risk of spooking them.

Fishing tight lines will give you much better indication as you are fishing with much longer hooklinks then on a convential carp rig. Most bites on Zigs may only register as a single bleep on your bite alarms so you want to stack the odds in your favour so you don't miss any potential pick ups!