Carp rods

Carp fishing has grown to become the most popular type of fishing in the UK. Many of you will be new to carp fishing and will be thinking about your first set of good quality rods but I think many of you reading this will have been carp fishing a little longer and already own a set of quality rods, probably built on Harrison's blanks.

For the newer carp angler I offer a few comments and a bit of history to help you better understand the types of rods we make.

The first quality carp rods of any standing were the Richard Walker MK1V's. These were 11ft. long, made from split cane and bent into an almost perfect curve under load. This type of rod was later copied in glass fibre. These rods were very effective at playing big fish in small waters. They could apply lots of pressure to a fish to tire it quickly but they were not so good at casting any distance, still, they did not need to,  fishing at the legendary Redmire didn't call for that.

Glass fibre revolutionized fishing rods and opened-up the possibility of making longer and lighter rods and as time went by, carbon fibre extended this trend. In the 1980's a good selection of carbon carp rods emerged from Conoflex, Sportex, Bruce and Walker, North Western Blanks and Tri-Cast. These were now stiffer, longer and in the main lighter. Twelve feet became the norm with a few thirteen footers available. If you were to compare these rods with the Richard Walker rods you would call them fast taper but by comparison to today's rods, they would be through action.

Through the 1990's trends in carp fishing had been to use bigger leads at longer distance. Venues fished got bigger and big fish were more plentiful. This called for a new generation of  rods and there were a number of different approaches in design and a few evolutionary non-starters used in carp blank materials - boron - kevlar - dyneema.

We have our own distinctive style of rods. We like to make beautiful rods and pride ourselves on our rod building, but function comes first, no gimmicks, focussing on the blank's performance first and foremost. Although we make rods that can cast distance, they all retain a certain feel when handling big fish. All our carp and barbel rods have unique characteristics that allows the blank to feel more alive in the hand when casting and playing fish, yet can produce great distance unlike stiffer, duller feeling blanks from abroad.

Feel free to use the enquire form to contact me for any technical information that you may require regarding our rods.

Don't forget our rods are Hand Made and British built, not mass produced in an Asian factory where they know nothing of our style of fishing.

Colin Leatherbarrow (rod builder)