PART TWO

Cupping power
- the final episode!
The first of my cupping articles
looked at the reasons why we should
use a pole cup. This time round I want to take a "hands on" approach, looking at the techniques for using the pole cup. Skills such as; how to smoothly ship your pole out when you have a heavy ball of groundbait stuck at the end of it; how to make sure that you empty it at exactly the same point every time; different ways of emptying a pole cup and how to make noise when feeding with a cup.

I have tried to break all these skills down into simple stages' and, with the help of William Raison, I'll explain exactly how one of the world's best, cup's in so smoothly.

Setting up the pole roller
A pole roller is a vital piece of equipment for cupping. The roller obviously supports the heavier butt sections of the pole and should make the whole shipping out operation smoother. However a badly placed roller is the cause of many problems when using a pole cup. The biggest single problem is "bounce", the moment the butt section leaves the roller. This happens because the roller takes the weight and balance of the pole and cup, and as the butt comes off the roller the point of balance in the pole suddenly shifts forward as the weight of the cup and its load are left unsupported. The pole then wobbles as the angler adjusts his hands and body to the new point of balance.

There are two major problems arising from pole bounce. First, it slows the angler down as he ships out because the whole shipping process is not as smooth as it should be. This can give the advantage to an angler next to you in a competition who is able to keep his fishing rhythm going, simply because he can feed faster. The second and more fundamental problem with pole bounce is psychological. If you start worrying about whether your ball of feed will stay in the cup, or not, you'll lose that vital control for the balance of the pole and will therefore never use a pole cup smoothly!

There are, however, a couple of factors you need to consider in order to solve the problem:

Factor 1 - Height
The first factor is the height of your roller. If we assume there's a flat bank behind the angler then the ideal height for a roller is just below knee level, about 30cm, off the ground. If the roller is higher than your knees then bounce will be caused as the butt section drops off the roller.

If the bank is gently sloping behind you set your roller off at an angle so that you are shipping the pole out to one side. In extreme cases, like canals with stone walls behind them, top anglers will ship out the whole pole parallel to the bank then swing it across the canal. There are some obvious situations where you simply cannot get a smooth low angle to ship out along; steep natural river banks, concrete backwalls, etc., can all make getting a low glide out virtually impossible. These are exceptions though. The essential thing to bear in mind is keep the height of your roller lower than your knee.

Factor 2 - Distance
The second key factor is the distance of the roller behind the angler. The mistake made by most is to PLACE the roller too close to them. They think that if you can use the roller to get most of the pole out then you will make the job easier. The reason why this is such a mistake is simple, as the pole comes off the roller there will be too much weight in front of the angler so the pole will bounce as the balance changes. To set a pole roller up correctly you need to think about the whole length of the pole. The ideal position for a roller is to take half the length of the pole and take a metre off.

So for a 10m. pole the roller should be about 4 metres behind the angler. You need to bring the roller closer when fishing at 13 metres, or longer, in order to counteract the extra weight of the butt section. So you would therefore place the roller about 5 metres behind you when fishing at 13 or 14 metres.

The reason why the roller should be a reasonable distance behind the angler is that you want your roller to be positioned at the balance point in the pole. As you ship the pole out you actually need the pole to be lifting slightly, off the roller, before the end of the butt section passes it. Think of the weight along the pole with the heavier butt section being counterbalanced by the longer tip section plus the weight of the bait you are carrying in the cup. If the balance in the pole has tipped forward just before the pole passes the roller then roller bounce will never happen.

Shipping out smoothly
There is a lot more to shipping out a pole with a cup full of groundbait than meets the eye. The first step to shipping out with a cup successfully is to understand that YOUR POLE WILL NOT BREAK. If you have cut your tip sections back hard, as described in part 1, then modern poles can cope easily with the weight of a cup full of feed. Anglers are strange, they accept that a pole can flex tremendously when a good fish is hooked, but worry about the same degree of flex when they can actually feel the weight directly and not cushioned by elastic.

The best way of thinking about pole flex is to think of looking at a pole from the tip end back towards the angler. You will all have seen pictures of anglers with a cup full of feed pointing right at the camera. The flex on their poles are about the same as they would get with,a 2lb bream and I can honestly say I have never heard of any angler snapping a pole on a bream! However, put about the same pressure on the pole by shipping out a 75 gram ball of groundbait supported directly on the pole tip and suddenly an angler becomes worried about the pole snapping - STRANGE!

The key to getting over this psycological problem is confidence I think that the reason why anglers suddenly become cautious when shipping out balls of feed is that they are simply not use to feeling direct weight on the pole tip.

Will Raison reckons that this is one aspect of fishing that you simply don't need to be on the lake or river to practise. Just sit in your garden with a bucket of stones and practice shipping out and cupping stones over and over again, you'll quickly realise just how strong your pole is. Will explained it quite simply, you just have to get used to the pole bending. Once you've done this you'll realise that the pole is actually designed to bend and you will stop worrying about it snapping!

Although I believe that confidence is a major key to cupping out smoothly there are a few practical considerations which can also help. When you watch an angler, of the calibre of William Raison, ship out cup after cup of feed with total ease you can start to analyse exactly how he manages the process. I invited him to break his action down into step by step stages.
Will uses his left hand to support the weight of the pole and guide it, all forward and return momentum comes from the right hand. He brings his right arm back about a metre and pushes the pole steadily forward through his left hand and sliding his right hand to repeat the process again.

There is nothing revolutionary in William's shipping action, he simply makes no mistakes. He doesn't push forward with his left hand, the pole doesn't stick on the way out and he is every bit as quick and slick with a large ball, as a small one! To prove just how fast and efficient he is at this I asked him to cup in four fairly large balls, at 11 metres, as you'd do at the start of a match. I then timed him from when he put the first ball in his cup to when he shipped back ready to put his rig section on. Will took 70 seconds to get all four balls delivered, with pinpoint accuracy, at 11 metres! He actions were calm and didn't appear nervous or flustered and I'm convinced he could easily deposit 15 balls in a 5 minute pre-baiting period, simply because he's so smooth and fluent in his movements.

Once again Will insists that practise in the garden, or the bank, is the key to a better shipping action - the more you do it the better you will become. William is fortunate enough to be able to fish more than most of us and I should know as at the time of writing this article I'd spent two days trying to get hold of him on the phone, finally managing to collar him late evening. The reason given for his absence was simple. "sorry Dave", he said, "but I've been fishing three matches a day all weekend" I think the rest of us may have to spend a little more time in the garden!

Marking the pole
The whole drive through these articles has been to achieve total accuracy in your feeding procedure. Even as you ship out the pole it's possible to vary by, up to 10 centimetres, how far the pole tip is offline, without even noticing. To overcome this problem Will marks the pole with tip-ex at the point where his right thumb should end up on the butt section of pole. With his right thumb over the mark he just pushes the pole forward to his normal fishing position and he knows that he will tip the cup exactly over the same spot every time.

On the longer sections of pole you can use the manufacturers markings as a guide, for instance, I us a faded "B " on my old Browning World Class as my guide. Whatever you use you need to set some sort of mark as a 5 or 10cm discrepency can be enough to throw your feeding plan completely out the window!

Emptying the pole cup
This may seem an obvious section but you can actually control how the bait goes into the swim with a cup in ways that are normally impossible.

The best way to deliver a ball of groundbait into a swim is to hold the cup about 20 cm above the surface and gently let the ball fall out of the cup. With a large ball, which you have wedged into the cup, you might need to give the butt section a tap to loosen it.

There isn't much you can do with a solid ball of groundbait, however, when you are feeding either loose groundbait or loosefeed in the pole then you can feed differently. If you want to create a steady stream of feed falling through the water then you can turn the cup a quarter turn and gently tap on the butt section with your right hand to bounce the feed out. This will trickle the feed into your swim and keep bait falling through the water a lot longer than if you had simply dumped the contents straight out. The same is true with loose groundbait. By trickling it into your swim the feed will hang in the water longer and create more of a visual attraction to the fish.

Noise with a pole cup
One of the great advantages of using a pole cup is that you can vary the way you introduce feed. You can gently drop the feed into the swim on sensitive waters such as canals etc., or you can use the noise factor.

Noise is often useful in attracting fish into your swim, especially carp, who sometimes view it as the dinner bell!. There are a couple of ways you can make noise when feeding with a pole cup. The first is to lift the pole cup higher so that the contents are dropped from a greater height. Even dropping feed 50 centimetres above the water will make a lot more noise than tipping it in at 20 cm. You can lift balls up to a metre, and more, off the surface should you want to.

The other way of making noise is to empty your cup as usual and with the open edge of the cup still facing the water tap it on the surface as often as you want.

The big plus here is that you do not have to feed any groundbait at all to create a noise attraction. Carp respond well to noise, as we all aware, because just by slapping the surface with your cup, repeatedly, carp will think that a lot of feed is going in the swim. The advantage of only having one ball there when the carp arrive is that they will find your hookbait a lot quicker than if there was a lot of feed waiting there.

Once again the pole cup opens new ways of feeding and creating attraction in the swim which are impossible to do when feeding conventionally.

Possible problems
I feel I should highlight a couple of things that can go wrong when using a pole cup. The first pitfall is when you have chop on the water in a blowy wind and there is a danger that your cup can actually become waterlogged as you rush to ship the pole in. There aren't many ways you can snap a cupping kit section... but this is one of them!

Another pitfall is caused when fishing in gale force conditions. You need to be especially careful to turn the open face of the cup away from the oncoming wind as you empty it or you run the risk of catching the wind which will place excessive strain your pole. I am talking about very extreme weather conditions, you shouldn't have any problems in these conditions so long as you take care.

Conclusion
William said that producing a series of articles on cupping for the UK market would be like doing a series of articles on balling in groundbait for the French. This article, however, was primarily written for Declic Peche, the top match fishing magazine in France, because there is no doubt that French anglers lag behind their UK counterparts in terms of cupping. Funnily enough I think that we should write more about balling in for the French market and equally we should not assume that every angler in the UK finds cupping as easy as William. I hope you find some, if not all, of this feature enlightening.