Success Fishing Rough Ground with Cox & Rawle Three-way Swivels
Rough ground fishing is a good compromise between keeping tackle losses to a minimum and retrieving your rig with a fish on it. The Three-Way Swivel from Cox & Rawle is the perfect basepoint for making up strong and reliable rigs for the rough stuff.
Tough Beginnings
To be honest, my experience with Swivels has not been great. Usually, they break in an inexplicable way, and many of them are a direct hazard when casting heavy leads and big baits. In the past, I have made my own using three CR.A-CS-BN Cox & Rawle Stainless Steel Crane Swivels and aCR.A-HDSRX Cox & Rawle Heavy Duty Split Ring .These, I have found are amongst the strongest and simplest three-way swivels I can use. I now however have found great pleasure in using Cox & Rawle’s own Three Way-Swivels, and I am not going back.
Cox & Rawle Three-Way Swivel sizes.
Cox & Rawle Three-Way Swivels come in a variety of options. The Flattie (60lbs), the Boat size (210lb) and the key ingredient in my rough ground rig – The Surf size (100lbs). In the picture above you’ll find the bigest and smallest offers neatly within their packaging. Eager to use them however, the surf size has already been put to work on my rigs and the packaging discarded.
Through some difficult Spring months fishing in heavy currents, the roughest of grounds and deep waters, I have developed a rig that suited my fishing perfectly with the Three-way Swivel being the star player in this effort.
To the left we can see the rig. In this instance, less is more so I try to keep the rig as simple as I can get it. The rig uitilises a Cox & Rawle Stainless 90° Bait Clip, the afformentioned Three-Way Swivel (in Surf size), your favourite leader material of choice, and a weak link line as a the rig body.
As simple as that!
I find all the stain when casting and battling a fish (or snagged hook) is sent directly through your shock leader, which is either tied directly to the top eye of the swivel or connected to a quick link and clipped at the top. I tie the hook legnth to the biggest swivel and the weak link to the smallest swivel . That way I am able to know that I’m keeping the swivel as strong as possible.
The Paternoster Loop Rig
I have christened this, the “Paternoster Loop Rig”. I normally tie the rig with 80lb rig body, and tie on a small swivel at the bottom. In the swivel I tie a small piece of weaker line, to reduce littering the seabed. Of course I could make the entire rig body out of the weak line, but in my opinion, I can see absolutley no benefit to littering.
The Paternoster Loop Rig has turned out to be a versatile all-round rig and I use it regularly in other conditions to rough ground. It casts well, clips easily behind the lead and can be adjusted to fish the bait any distance from the bottom. Please do remember, when the crabs are up and about, raising the rig or popping up your baits are crucial.
I have used the rig to great success with hair rig lengths as well. I have been experimenting a lot with different ways of hair rigging baits for distance fishing, and I am still in the testing period. This is somewhat new territory for me, regarding the Dongle Rigs, and I will return to this in a later article. I can’t wait to continue using it for Thornback Rays!.
The Dongle Rig presents loads of oppurtunities on the work bench in the shop, and the variants are endless. I find that using two rubber beads each side of a suitable swivel on the hook bend works great for bigger baits and hooks but is too bulky for smaller ones.
One of my Favourites are simply using a knotless knot on a Cox & Rawle SCR44 Mutsu Circle hook, tying on silicone tubing on the hair for bait elastic to grab onto.
Lasse Bøe
Cox & Rawle Ambassador
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