Liver & Soft Bait Rigs

The biggest issue encountererd when fishing with liver, pastes, cod roe or very soft fish sections such as sardine is keeping the bait on the hook for all but the softest underarm swing. Chicken livers for instance are a prime cat bait but very soft indeed. The article below written by experienced CCG member Trevor Pritchard highlights a perfect solution for presenting these baits.

The Button, Liver Rig

Squid and ox or pigs liver are popular cat baits and whilst not especially soft can be difficult to present well whilst making sure that your hook point isn't masked. The secret is to either cut your liver or squid into pieces and hair rig them as you would fish sections or just nick the hook through the bait and secure it to the hook length with a half hitch.

Innovative CCG member Gerry Chandler came up with a novel and highly successful way of of presenting liver. This was published in Whiskers 33  and is quoted below 

I had been having a few problems when using liver. I always fish it on a hair but found that quite often the liver would slide down the hair and bunch up at the bottom especially if I had to cast a good distance. This caused me to miss a fair few takes when the catfish took the bait but not the hook.
With a bit of experimentation I came up with a way of making sure that the hook was presentedhalf way along the bait so that when the fish picked the bait up it had to have the hook in its mouth. Basically I tied the hook so that a hair a little over half inch long came out of the back of the eye. The hair was pulled through the liver about half to three quarters along the bait and a lump of grass stem or similar stout stop was pushed through the loop so that the hook was tight to the liver and a half- hitch loop was made at the narrow end of the bait ( see pics). I have made 70yd casts with this set-up and it has been fine.

Gerry Chandler with a lovely upper thirty caught using his liver hooking arrangement