SFM Winch Float As most catfish anglers will know, many items of our armoury are homemade which have normally been thought up while enduring endless hours of blanking. This includes many of the rigs we use, which in this case I am referring to the amazing winch method. There seem to be mixed opinions of exactly where this method came from but whoever did think of it, opened up a whole new world for the angler wanting to fish a live bait at range.
Gone are the days of casting a bait out, for it to slap the water and die on impact, gone are the days of only using baits that are small enough to be cast out. The winch, which is described in further detail on this website has enabled us to fish at range of 50-60-70 metres, in fact the distance is purely controlled by how far your tackle can cast a 5oz lead. There is a technique which is required to stop tangles and this does mean that leads cant be walloped out in a casting to the horizon sort of way, but I have successfully placed 6-8 oz baits at 80 yards range with no problems.
Now when you first rig up for the winch you will normally experience a few problems, and one of these has now been taken away from us which was what the hell do I make my winch float out of.
Over the years I have seen all sorts, from nothing, which has a success rate of around zero, to polyballs on bits of tubing, ping pong balls, and my favourite a crafted piece of balsa wood carefully hollowed out one end, swivels inserted and stuck in several places and then painted. This was my method for the last few years and I have to say I was pleased with a success rate of approx 70%. This percentage refers to the number of casts you make that don’t get tangled, which when you are casting 2 lines out into the water and normally using braid, they can be a nightmare to get some of them out.
Anyway for a few years I plodded on with my bit of balsa until I was introduced to something that looked very interesting indeed, The SFM specially and may I say, professionally, constructed winch float.
This consists of a shaped piece of indestructible foam (a choice of colours and size is available) which is semi fixed onto a length of tubing and all nicely finished off with some shrink tubing and quality swivels, to say it made my balsa wood float look poor was an understatement.
So on it’s first outing I decided that proof had to be in the pudding and no matter how good it looked, it had to beat my 70% success rate to find a place in my tackle bag. 6 weeks on and no word of a lie, it has not tangled once. I cant promise that this wont happen to you, but I can say that based on my results, it will dramatically improve things. I believe there are 2 reasons for it’s superiority, one being the length of tubing used and also the amount of buoyancy the foam provides, this keeps the winch line well away from the main line as it goes out and down to the lake bed, which has always been the problem with the method. They sail back across the surface due to their aerodynamic shape and look the part.
To use the words that a good friend of mine recently used to describe them. “You can take a journey of the same distance in a mini or in a Ferrari, both will get you there eventually, but in very different ways”
Those 30% of the time occasions where I sat on the floor trying to sort out the tangle from hell ending up with 30 yards of braid cut up in a bucket, instead of a live bait kicking its socks off, with a dead sardine slung very despondently in the edge are no longer.
The mini has been binned and the Ferrari is deffinately a step forward in my angling.