| I met up with Steve one Monday morning during the middle of March at Canons Ashby near Steve's home town of Northampton, to put together this feature on Hair rigging bait. Canons Ashby is not an ordinary match venue, in that open matches are few and far between, with club bookings being the order of the day. It is a water locally noted for some big fish and as Steve stated, 10 fish here can give you 100lb or more.
We arrived at the venue at 10.45am. The weather was cold and windy and the very first view of the two pools at this complex made a cup of oxo look gin clear! Due to the amount of rain we had received over the previous few days it had caused the water to turn a chocolate brown, not awe-inspiring to say the least. " We should still have one or two" said Steve " So don't worry " He said with a smile, and off we went to the top pool.
When we got there, there was one other angler on the water so choice of pegs was not a problem. Steve elected to fish peg 4, a peg basically in the middle of the bank. The wind had got up even further by now and was whistling across the pool causing bow waves! Undeterred he started to set up his gear, which consisted of a Shimano Nexave medium multi range feeder rod, with eleven feet being the chosen length, to this he attached a Shimano Stradic FG 4000 reel, being a front drag type.
The reel was loaded with 4lb Shimano Exage line and was fed through the rod rings. To the main line a small swivel was attached and to this an arlesley bomb. This was purely so that Steve could find his casting distance and to see how the strong wind would affect his overall chuck. So out the bomb went and he settled for a 35 yard chuck towards the middle of the lake and he clipped up. A far distance marker was noted and out the bomb went again, five or six times, just to check the accuracy of the cast and to test the strength of the wind.
Distance set and the bomb and swivel were removed from the line. His chosen method today was to be a small groundbait cage feeder, fixed to the line via the two loop approach. This basically entails sliding a link swivel onto the line and tying a loop slightly longer than the total length of the feeder. This single loop is then split into two, one being for the feeder to free run and the other allows the hook length to be attached.
 
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