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TheCarpCatchers Blog
Old School
Out in the boat
29 Jan 2016 The hair rig
2004articleshair-riglenny-middletonrigswoolpack
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In 2002 I started to fish the Woolpack lakes in Godmanchester. One of the resident anglers on there was a fella named Lenny Middleton. Lenny and a few of his friends as we know are attributed with the development of the hair rig.
Obviously I asked and we chatted about this and other subjects on many occasions. However it is a story that Lenny told me by the banks of the woolpacks lake two/three one afternoon that I would like to relay to you here.

Lenny spent an enormous amount of time fishing the Woolpack and would often stay two weeks at a time. This of course lead to him being very sociable and the offer of a chat and a brew was always on the cards. I of course admired Lenny, he was real old school and let's face it a proper legend.
Through our numerous cuppers I gradually began to ask him about the old days and in particular the origins of the hair rig. The account he gave me is something else that will always stay with me. I remember it all so well and can picture myself now sitting by lake two having yet another cupper with Lenny and discussing all things carpy as well as putting the world to rights. Lenny was still tying the original hair rig he first wrote about in Course Angler in November 1981 and this led to the question I eventually asked, 'How did you get the idea?', this is what he told me.

Lenny had been fishing a number of waters and doing well on particles and being the inquisitive type wanted to know what other particles he could catch on.
He had determined that the carp were particularly fond of sweet baits and so to this end searched for a particle to fulfil this requirement. The only one he could think of was tiger nuts as he remembered that when he was a kid you couldn't get sweets (rationing) and so they used to get a cone of tiger nuts instead.
He went out and brought some and took them home to prepare. However, no matter how much he boiled them they simply did not get soft enough to side hook. After many attempts to get the tigers to stay on the hook he eventually decided to tie one onto his hook using a piece of fine line.
He immediately caught and through the day continued to cast out the same bait each time. Eventually the knot worked loose yet he noticed he was still catching fish.
What happened after that as they say, is history.
So there you go, the invention of the hair rig wasn't about catching shy fish, about rig mechanics or stealth, it was about bait.