River Fishing Tips | How to set up a flat float - Darren Cox

The flat float rig

The flat float rig

IT MAY look tricky, but setting up a flat float is easy once you’ve done it a few times.

On a river the idea is to present the bait well overdepth and completely static. That means plumbing up so there’s anything between 12ins and 24ins of line and the bait laid on the riverbed.

To do this, set up with a single large dropper shot under the olivette and put a clip-on plummet on the shot.

Plumb as normal so that this shot effectively ends up just off bottom with that long bit of line on the bottom below it. You can add a few small shot to the line on the deck if you want to make sure the bait remains totally still.

I’d shot the float to leave around half the bristle on show. When held back, the bristle will rise up slightly but without having any of the float body come out of the water. A 3g flat float will manage most situations but in very strong flows this could be upped to 5g.

Components

  1. FLOAT - 3g Cralusso

  2. LINES - 0.16mm Garbo Line fished straight through

  3. SHOTTING - Fix the olivette 12ins away from a large dropper shot set just off bottom

  4. DEPTH - Set the rig to be fished 2ft overdepth

  5. HOOK Size - 13 Kamasan B711

  6. HOOKBAIT - A whole worm or three or four dead maggots