A few people have asked about the pop rig I use for pelagics so have knocked up a quick diagram which has been refined for this site. This type of fishing is simple as it gets with a light bodied flapper rig but you can make the body a bit heavier if you need to cast a bit further, and two hooks.
Snoods are fairly light weight although you could go lighter but personally I haven’t found any advantage there.
Pop up colour is basically irrelevant as I’ve caught on every colour. I do tend to use mainly silver for daylight mackerel bashing but prefer luminous when fishing the evening as scad like a bit of a glow and it saves me changing the rig if I fish into darkness cos I’m lazy.
I use size 4’s for mackerel and scad but would go down to 6’s or even 8’s for gars. If gars are the main target I would also use a longer rig and snoods.
Bait size is approx 15mm x 6mm as you don’t need a chunk. To make sure the pop ups can float the bait just drop the rig into the sea to make sure it floats as you don’t want it rolling around in the seabed.
Weights are mainly 2 – 3 oz.
Moving the bait on a regular basis often helps with all of those species.
Once you’ve caught a couple of mackerel on this rig you won’t ever want to use feathers again!
Also stick the rod as high as you can in your rod rest. It won’t catch you any more fish but the bites can be quite spectacular. Tis muchos much fun!
For matches the rig would have three hooks and be longer.
Click on image for larger version
There are numerous sources of terminal tackle both locally and on-line, here are a few suggestions –
