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PART ONE
What makes cupping
in so effective?
You might well expect an article on pole cupping to concentrate on how to smoothly ship the cup in and out! If the angler featured in such an article were Will Raison this would be a real bonus. You may also fairly expect some tips on how to fix a cupping kit onto your pole. Surely a decent pole cupping article would also review the different pole cups available on the market. Well if this is what you expect this is what I hope to give you …. but in PART TWO!
When Nicolas Beroud asked me to write an article on pole cupping I wanted to take a further step back and look at WHY cupping is such an effective method. What exactly do you gain from being able to feed all your bait in exactly the same spot? I know a lot of you will say accuracy is what you gain but I have never weighed in a load of 'accuracy' in a match. What I want to try to explain is how being able to feed so accurately actually catches you more fish!
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Why is a pole cup so accurate?
Cupping is the only method which guarantees the angler a 100% certainty that his feed is placed in exactly the same position as his float. I know that a lot of anglers are excellent when it comes to feeding balls of groundbait by hand. However, I challenge any of you to be accurate to within 10, or even 20, centimetres with every ball thrown in at 13 metres compared to pole cupping!
Even if you were the Petanque (French Bowls) Champion of the world, I still question whether every ball you throw in by hand falls through the water dead straight. We all know that balls thrown by hand hit the water at an angle. This trajectory will slightly influence the path the ball takes down through the water. You might argue that you can always feed your balls in high but even so the sort of accuracy I am talking about, within a 20 centimetre zone on the bed of a lake (every time), is impossible when you ball in by hand.
A cupping kit can change all that. Firstly, because you are dropping the feed in vertically there is never a flight trajectory to move it away from your 'feed zone', when you cup in your feed it goes straight down! Secondly, because your pole is a fixed length you should always get your feed in exactly the same spot. Cupping-in as a method has come a long way over the past few years.
Early pot systems
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Clip-ons
When I first used pole pots they were those clip on plastic cups which fixed on to the top section of your pole. The clips always managed to be at least 30cm from the tip of your pole, so we had to ship out our poles until we the last section was in our hands and then push the pole a bit further forward to compensate for the fact the pole cup was set back so far! I can honestly say that even at 13 metres I cannot swear that I pushed that pole forward by exactly the same amount every feed.
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There would always be some nagging doubt that, when fishing in open water, my float would be in exactly the same spot as my feed, and at 15 metres, in a wind, the effort of making sure that a clipped on pot did not tip over, infact, it was a relief to get the pole pot anywhere near where I wanted it, being more than grateful to have dumped my feed in the general area rather than have had it bounce out half way across!!!
Swingers
As well as these clip on pots we had swinging cups which were attached along your top section. These had two points of contact with the pole and because the cup could swing below your top section you were much less likely to "bounce" a ball out as you could with the clipped on pots. Once again the pole cup itself was often 30-40 centimetres short of the pole tip. This gave you the same problem of pushing your pole tip forward and guessing how much to compensate to get the feed, sort of, accurate.
I remember a match where I drew a deep swim known for big chub. We always pole fished this swim but when you loosefed you could never be sure that your bait would hit the bottom within the two metre run that you had on the pole, given the flow and the depth of the swim. The answer on this swim we had come up with was to cup in balls of groundbait absolutely stuffed with hemp and casters and fix the fish in that one spot, then loosefeed over the top of it to draw the fish in. I think I was counting the money even before I started fishing that match. I mixed up a small amount of groundbait and stuffed it with a pint of casters and a pint of hemp. I made up two big balls and set up my swinging cup. The swinging cup could cope with quite large balls - or so I thought!
I can still remember the feeling of complete disbelief and utter misery when with the pole two thirds across the swinging attachment decided to DETACH itself from the pole. The plastic cup manage to float for a few seconds before disappearing under the waves, depositing half my feed in the wrong place and leaving me 'swingless'. I don't recall (conveniently) how I did on the day, but I didn't win a bean! I think this particular episode must have knocked me right off my stride for the day!
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Cupping kits
What revolutionised cupping forever was the introduction of screw in pots which you attach to the end of a special tip section. These bounce less than the old systems, and they never spring off!. Their biggest single advantage is that they sit right at the end of your pole section. There is no more shoving the pole forward and 'guesstimating' whether you've compensated for a pole pot stuck 30 cm down your kit. With the screw in system the end of your pole is where you feed.
Once top anglers realised just how precise this system was they quickly adapted their way of pole fishing to take advantage of the system. What has happens is that you have to cut back ALL your pole kits, no matter what elastic they are taking, to exactly the same length as the cupping kit sections. Steve Gardener explained how he approaches setting up any pole these days. He takes the thickest elastic he is going to use with the pole, say a no.12, and cutts back one kit to comfortably accommodate that elastic, using an external bush. Once this kit is cut back he cuts the rest of his kits back to exactly this same length. One of these will have the pole cup attached to it but the others, (Steve carries a lot of kits!) will take every elastic diameter he intends to use. He will fish a no.2 elastic through exactly the same size external bush as used for his no.12 elastic!
Will Raison has featured often in Declic showing all his kits cut back to the same length whereas you might have thought that only his heavy elastic carp kits are cut back hard. This is not the case, every kit these anglers use is cut back to exactly the same length, which seems like a rather drastic thing to do to all of your top kits. When you see a tiny elastic coming out of a massive bush you do quite wonder what is the point is in losing, and seemingly wasting, vital length to your pole.
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The whole point of cutting every section back to exactly the same length as your cupping kit section is that you can get absolute precision whenever you feed, no matter what elastic you are using. This absolute precision comes from the fact that you never have to change the position you hold your pole in. If you have 30cm of pole behind your right knee when you are fishing then when you ship out to feed you can stop at exactly the same length and feed. This way YOU KNOW that your feed will be exactly beneath the tip of your pole and float, no matter what elastic you're using.
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What do I gain from being so accurate with my feeding?
This was the key question I raised at the start of this piece so before I go and cut back all of my top sections, hard, and loose perhaps 70cm or so of length from my pole...
I want to know exactly why I am doing it?
I want to know why feeding this accurately will catch me more fish?
Why have these top anglers sacrificed distance on their poles for absolute accuracy?
Having talked to Will and Steve at length about this crucial subject I want to show the reasoning behind the importance of accurate feeding. I will therefore look at three specific fishing situations and explain how feeding accuracy could actually mean more fish at the end of the day.
1 - The dump and wait approach
This is where you are fishing to a particular feature. This might be a branch on the far bank of a narrow canal or it could margin fishing to a bush or some rushes. The 'feature' could just as easily be underwater, the edge of a ledge or the deepest point in a canal for instance. You'd usually expect fish, hopefully big ones, to move over your feed at sometime during the day, but they are probably not there when you start. Because you are fishing to a specific feature you want to keep all your bait in as tight an area as possible in order to stop and hold the fish. This type of fishing is often called 'dump and wait' and that is exactly what it is. You dump a quantity of bait exactly where you think the fish will patrol and then you wait for a fish to find it.
It's easy to see why you'd use a pole cup to accurately feed to a feature, be it visible or invisible. The cup gets your feed exactly to the spot you want. However there is a little more to this method than just getting your feed next to a feature. You know that you can fish totally accurately over the exact spot where you have fed and you should be able to tell, almost immediately, whether fish have moved over your feed. If fish move over the feed then you will get the odd blip or knock on the float, especially the're big fish. If you get no indication of fish at all after a minute or so then you can be fairly confident that there are no fish there and can therefore continue on another line. This can gain you a lot of time in a match as you can easily waste five or more minutes exploring a line if you are not totally sure that all your bait is in exactly the same spot.
I watched Will do this at Gold Valley Lakes. He fed half a litre of casters in one go under a bush and continued doing something else. He gave the fish a bit of time to find the feed then put a rig over the spot. Thirty seconds later he announced "they're not there yet, who wants a cup of coffee?" Now you might be thinking that Will just fancied a coffee so I asked him how he could be so sure they were not there. He pointed out that he was only fishing in a margin swim 60cm deep and that carp were big fish, As all the feed was in a pile if big fish had been investigating his feed then he would see some indication straight away. In a match he would have continued catching small fish to build his weight. Cupping in meant that he could look and see whether his 'dump and wait' strategy had worked quickly thereby not losing too much time and rhythm on his main line of attack.
The proof of how good Will was at this is that we emerged from having a coffee twenty minutes later and he shipped out over the feed and within twenty seconds (I kid you not) he said "they're there". It took him two or three minutes to hook his first fish but Will knew, almost immediately, that there were fish in the swim. Had he loosefed bait or not been 100% sure that his float was lying directly over the mound of feed he'd cupped in Will could not have read what was happening on this line as quickly or as surely.
So the first benefit to cupping in is... you can tell exactly when big fish have moved over your feed and cut back on wasted time waiting to see if they're there or not. The pole cup therefore can save you time!
2 - The bonus fish
This is a situation faced by all match anglers. You fish a venue where the target fish are say small roach but there is the chance of some larger skimmers. It is the angler who can get two or three of these bonus fish to go with his roach who'll probably take the coin. The permutations of fish could be different, in the UK we might be looking at fishing for skimmers with a bonus carp, or rudd fishing with the chance of a tench or two. The idea of the 'bonus fish' is a useful concept in match fishing. Steve Gardener was adamant that accurate feeding is a vital part to making sure that you maximise your chances of catching a bonus fish.
Steve explained that when one or two bonus fish can make the difference in a match then you must feed with a cup. His reason was fascinating and simple. Steve believes that lots of anglers have good fish in their swim at some point during a match but they scare off. One reason is that if you had balled in and laid a bed of feed say one metre by one metre there is a good chance that bonus fish will move over this at some point in the day. Your hookbait will be lying somewhere in that square metre, which has larger fish moving over it. As they move over the feed there is a fair chance that a fin, tail or the belly of a fish will brush against your hooklength, or hookbait, leading to a line bite - and you strike. We've all had this sort of experience, you strike and feel some resistance for a second or two then its gone. The line hasn't snapped, nothing breaks and often we think that a fish has dropped the bait, or that we've pricked a snag. Steve thinks that sometimes you haven't just bumped a smaller fish, you've actually pricked a bonus fish. You don't have to prick a fish to spook it. Just the feel of the line brushing along the side a larger and more wary fish will be enough.
What happens is that a large fish panics, moves off, taking other larger fish with it. From the angler's point of view you can fish a swim all day and never really be aware that the bonus fish you need to win the match had been in your swim at some point. However because they were swimming over your hookbait you had just pricked one and spooked them.
Steve explained that when you cup in groundbait on a lake the feed will be in a much tighter area on the bottom. Therefore when your bait is in the middle of an area, say 20sq.cm., there is much less chance of a big fish swimming over your hookbait thereby reducing the chance of foul hooking and spooking the better fish. There is also a greater chance of it actually taking your hookbait, as it will be lying right at the heart of the available food.
This same way of thinking, but in reverse this time, applies when you are really bagging up with quality fish. I fish a certain venue during the summer where 30 kilos of big crucians are regularly netted and one of the best ways to start feeding for them is to cup in a bed of pellets with perhaps some corn or casters. The fish usually come to the feed quite quickly but what makes the difference between winning and losing on this particular lake is whether you can hold the fish! When you have hoards of big fish feeding actively over a bed of feed you can cut down the number of foul hooked fish by fishing on the edges of your baited area. What happens is the fish churn up the bed of pellets and casters, (there can be up to a dozen fish at a time chomping about in the heart of that feed) therefore if you fish slap bag in the middle of all that gear then the chances of foul hooking a fish is far greater because of their feeding frenzy. By fishing towards the edge of the feed zone you reduce the chance of foul hooking! Once again you can only do this, with any degree of certainty, if you know EXACTLY where that main feed zone is. By cupping in you keep the centre of your feed very tight, the fish will still find the feed, even in a tight 20sq.cm area, allowing you to easily keep the hookbait to outer fringes of the main feed and pick off the fish one by one!
Benefit number two - you can cut down on the number of fish you foul hook in a day by keeping the feed very tight. This stops the fish moving over a wider bed of feed where they run the risk of pricking themselves on your hookbait.
3 - Feed what you like
The cupping gives you the freedom to feed, at distances up to 20 metres, in ways that were simply not possible before by taking away those previous hit and miss methods of propelling your feed from the bank (i.e. catty, throwing stick, hand etc. etc).
By being able to deliver boilies, groundbait, worms or a dozen squatts, to exactly the same spot, at different times, the pole cup gives you flexibility without compromising that vital accuracy.
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GROUNDBAIT OPTIONS
Will Raison talked me through some of the more common combinations possible with a pole cup, firstly how he introducing an initial bed of feed to a swim. His ideal ball for feeding with the cup is a small orange size which sits in the appropriate cup and is just held by the cups edges. This stops the ball rolling or bouncing about as you ship out, allowing you to get the feed into the swim very quickly.
However there are some matches where feeding small orange size balls is simply not enough. Would Will use a cup in matches where anglers were balling feed in around him? I asked him what was the largest ball you could feed with a cup. He smiled a little as he moulded his groundbait into what looked like an Easter egg! He then proceeded to wedge one end of this 'egg' into his cup to give an uncanny resemblance to 'Humpty Dumpty'. Will then casually shipped 'Humpty' out and dumped it right on the spot. What it proves, is that, from the smallest top-up ball to (almost) the largest initial feed balls, you can feed in exactly the same spot in your swim with relative ease and complete accuracy.
It's worth mentioning that manufacturers offer pole cups in a variety of sizes, but most top anglers tend to stick to one large size pot. I suspect that there's another minor motive for keeping a large pot... it can confuse the anglers around you as too how much feed your putting in, especially on a hard day or on a canal!
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The cup also allows you to feed very wet balls of groundbait which you simply cannot throw out 14.5 metres by hand. With a cup, feeding this 'soup' becomes simple, as does another option which was previous impossible by hand. Will explained that if you want to create a cloud that will hang in the water for a long time then you should not squeeze your groundbait into a ball, simply dampen your mix so it is still a little on the dry side then fill your cup with loose mix, you can then drop a cup full of mix in your swim and as none of the groundbait particles have been squashed together, or compressed, each particle will then hang in the water.
LOOSEFEED OPTION
One of the problems with normal loose feeding is that different baits travel different distances. Even maggots and casters will not fall in quite the same spot, casters will always go that bit further. Obviously this is not a problem with a cup. I use a pole cup when feeding pellets and have caught a lot of fish over the years using micro pellet, with just a few of the larger 5mm hookbait size in amongst them. It is impossible to get baits of such different weight spot on with a catapult yet with a pole cup I can lay a carpet of mini pellet down with just a few larger pellets scattered in amongst them.
There are other baits that are impossible to feed pure without a pole cup. UK anglers have been using pure chopped worms for years with great success, for all sorts of fish. I first started using chopped worms 25 years ago on the Scottish match circuit when we had to feed the worms in peat or soil simply because they couldn't be thrown in neat at 11 metres (yes, 11 metres were the longest poles we had in them days!!!) Today's angler can feed pure worms at whatever pole distance they want (or have), thanks to the cup. The same is also true of liquidised bread, another typical English method which relies heavily on being fed in a pole cup.
'HYBRID' FEEDING
I am deliberately not going into excessive detail on what is possible with a pole cup. Your imagination can easily see situations where, say sweetcorn, sitting tight on a bed of hemp, will catch fish or chopped worms and casters will work. The principle is simple, you can feed whatever you want in a cup and deliver it to exactly the same point. However there is one way of feeding which I think offers another opening for creative thinking. That is feeding a ball of crumb along with some loosefeed in the same cup (hybrid feeding). The effect of this is fantastic, the groundbait drops quickly to the bottom then the loosefeed falls slowly round about it. I like doing this with chopped worms and fishmeal groundbait, a deadly mixture for bream. Will demononstrated the same principle with casters and specialised carp groundbait.
Imagine how effective a ball of groundbait breaking open on the bottom of a lake or canal might be if loosefeed was slowly falling around it. One advantage of this sort of hybrid feeding is that you do not have to carry any feed in the groundbait itself, all the nutritional bait... casters, pellets, maggots or worms can be added separately and will fall slower and settle enticingly on top of the groundbait. This greatly enhances the visual attraction of top up feeding, as the loosefeed will hang in the water a lot longer than a ball of groundbait. Hybrid feeding also makes sure that you deliver to the fish the food that is immediately accessible, they are not waiting on a ball of groundbait to break up before they get to eat!
Benefit number three: No other way of feeding gives you so much flexibility in what you actually put into the swim. Only a pole cup lets you feed exactly what you want where you want it!
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Conclusion
I go back to what I said in the first section of this article. To succeed at cupping in you have to be prepared, at worse, to cut all of your kits back to the same length as the cupping kit section. This is a stumbling block for many anglers who want to keep their kits as long as possible. The main benefit of cutting all your kits to the same length is accuracy, of course. It takes away that element of guessing and judging which we had with earlier cupping systems. I have never been too impressed with the argument that accuracy alone is vital in fishing. I have tried to find out WHY accuracy is such a benefit when pole fishing. The benefits highlighted in each of the examples are concrete and real... time saved in a match... less fish foul hooked... being able to feed very different baits with total accuracy. I understand how these can help me catch more fish.
Of course, there is an alternative for those of you who don't want to be so 'draconian' with all your lengths! Try creating a additional pole cupping kit for just canal/winter fishing, then you'll only have to cut back as far, as say, a no.6 elastic. The same principle applies... you must make sure that all your tops are the same length, EXACTLY, as that extra pole cupping section!!!
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I hope that you get some feel of the benefits of accurate cupping from what I've said. PART 2 takes a practical look at HOW to cup in on the pole, starting with how to attach the cup and how to ship out smoothly and confidently. We will be getting more tips from Will Raison on just how to do it and just to whet your appetite... I was watching Will cup out some casters at 16 metres and from filling his pole cup to bringing the cup back to his hand and putting a rig on, he took a total of …. 15 SECONDS, I know because I timed it. 15 seconds to feed half a litre of casters with pinpoint accuracy at 16 metres... till next time, then, "keep on cupping!"
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