PACKAGE

- Two Powerlite slotted and bushed Power kits
- Match top-3 kit housed inside the pole
- Mini extension
- Short No4
- Cupping kit and cups
- Pole holdall and protective tubes
- Informative DVD

PAY AROUND

13m £499.99, 14.5m £549.99

The lads at Maver certainly didn’t hold back when they told me about their new Definition 14.5m carp pole.

“This is the best power carp pole we have ever built,” they said confidently.

“It’s manufactured using a new hi-tensile carbon cloth, it has all the best patented build technologies, and it comes with an impressive spares kit package – you’re going to be blown away by it”.

They were talking about a pole aimed fair and square at anglers who plunder commercial fisheries where the carp have grown big… very big.

So just how strong is this pole? One way to find out is to hook a huge fish tight to solid walls of rig-destroying reeds, then hang on as the beast attempts to bottom-out the strongest elastic known to man. It’s toe-tingling stuff, but any pole that survives that kind of test certainly earns its ‘power pole’ badge – as indeed this one did.

Maver rates the pole for a 20-plus elastic, so I armed the test model with a more versatile but no less substantial Maver Dual Core Retro 12-20, threaded through one of the brilliant Powerlite top kits which come both slotted and bushed (two are supplied with the package).

That done, I headed east to the day-ticket Westwood Lakes near Boston, in Lincolnshire, which is home to some legendary zoo creatures of the finny kind.

Assembling the Definition on the banks of the fishery’s picture postcard Hawk Lake only boosted my confidence in its power-playing abilities. A blind man on a galloping horse couldn’t fail to notice the pole’s obvious section wall strength. Squeeze hard on the fourth, fifth or six sections (the ones that take the most punishment) and you’ll have to strain to oval any of the joints.

After catching one or two bream and small tench fishing corn and chopped worm at dead depth, I hooked my first decent fish of the day.

Elastic spilled from the pole-tip, and with the imminent prospect of the fish making it all the way around the island I was sitting opposite, I dug in and pulled back for all I was worth.

When I do this in a match, it normally and rather annoyingly pulls the hook out. But not this time. Now, I have no idea how carp can get such a grip in water, only that they certainly can. However, just at the critical point of no return the pole did its job of, let’s say, ‘persuading’ the fish to come to heel.

Hugely impressive, and with an SSP of under £500 for the 13m model, I have no hesitation in saying that in my opinion, for the price, the Definition is the best all-round power carp pole currently on the market.

VERDICT

Not quite as strong or unyielding as the brutish Maver Invincible, the Definition is built on the same mandrel as the firm’s top-end Signature poles.

This makes it eminently affordable, and it makes more sense to use this, rather than your two or three grand Signature, in a peg full of section-busting snags.

Instead of hoping for the best as the float dips, you’ll be fighting big fish on your own terms.

Mark Sawyer