How many of you out there started carping with £50+ of rig bits in your tackle box or a £200+ bivvy or bedchair. I think the intruduction to carping section of C I F is just a glorified ad for leslies of luton.

In 1995 started with a second hand DAM rod and my old sislstar feeder reel. Night sessions were spent on a foam mat under old army poncho. With saved up cash i aquired an old oval brolly and a second rod from another carp lad on the lake. I have over the the years built up my kit usually second or hand through the network of friends i have made the years.Is'nt this the way many of us get kitted out? yes looking at my gear now there maybe £50 worh of rig bits,bivvys bedchairs and the rest.

When I started out had an Intrepid reel and a Shakespear Strike rod 10ft, washing up bottle tops and an Argos type brolly, fished for carp and caught !
Harv showing my age !!

What a great forum, always some thing to slag off!!!!!!!!!!!

Harv showing my age !!

And mine too !!!
Although I did aspire to tackle tart at a fairly early age when I upgraded from Intrepid to a Mitchell 300

Ah yes happy days! Living off of Pot Noodles for the week, sleeping on a sun lounger (how many of you suffered from flying springs bouncing off the side of your bivvy when you turned over in the night), Bite alarms that only dogs could hear if it was raining, 9 ft ledger rods with no name reels. Upright bivvies on a 50" brolly (used to be knicknamed t!t domes i think!) they kept you fit as you ran round the lake chasing your bivvy if the wind was more than 2 mph. A "mass baiting campaign" amounted to 20 boilies/ tin of sweetcorn. Gas cookers that froze up if it was less that 2 degrees. Wearing 16 pairs of socks inside your box standard wellies. Putting map pins into your rod handles as line clips.

Come to think of it, it's about time I upgraded some of this kit!

Ah, memories!
I too can remember Send Marketings Brollycamp, Windbeaters, those really poor banksticks with a brass top, black body and solid alloy tip, full cork handles and heron alarms.
Also, sunloungers that collapsed at the head end whenever you moved or had the legs fold up underneath you at the feet end.
Also, totally crap sleeping bags, Derri boots and black Sylcast!

And..................trapped fingers in your garden chair. Hair rigs, ha, that'll never work, arlseley bombs, ledger stops and specials.
Landing nets that out weighed the all up weight of the rest of your tackle, Mitchell 810's and ruck sacks that pulled you over.....backwards!

I remember when I saw the first rod pod, what the hell were those all about, get your mallet out you tart!

And.......there's more..........The Kevin Maddocks Adjusta Level Bedchair! (circa 1981)

Bloody hell lads.. you had all the luxuries there...I used to sit up all night on a deckchair..alarms..what were they? Bread paste on the line lit by a torch.
One thing that springs to mind though were the "rigs" we used when I were a lad.
About 2 feet 8lb maxima to a size 4 hook. Looped to mailine with a split shot then a piece of hard plastic tubing (like the inside of a bic pen) followed by a great big arsley bomb. The weight of the lead used to pull against the plastic keeping the hooklink well out of the way. (Going to play around with something similar now I've remembered..acts a bit like a boom)
We then used to wrap groundbait and stuff around the lead and lob it in the lake..early method feeder pioneers we must have been. Nowt new in fishing eh? This was 30 years ago!

yes lads but you loved it really
mart