Keeping It Kompact

Working full-time as a teacher and part-time as an angling coach means that I have very limited bank time to myself, so in a bid to up my personal catch rate I recently started doing midweek overnighters between work.

- Mike Salsbury

This can be quite demanding both physically and mentally, and the last thing you want when you’re on a tight schedule is to be lugging around cumbersome kit that takes ages to set up and pack away.

After condensing my camping gear to just the bare essentials for these trips, the next thing I had to look at was the rods I was going to use for the job. Obviously a three-rod setup of 12-footers was not ideal, so it was time to look at shorter options that packed down as small as possible. Having scoured the market extensively I found the Kompact CN (Carp-Nano) rods from Kodex. Unlike anything I’d seen before, these rods can be used in either 9ft or 10ft lengths, owing to the optional addition of an extra section. They have the added muscle of 3lb test curve, which was more than capable of dealing with any carp I’d be targeting, and the biggest advantage was that they could pack down to a mere 42in. This was exactly what I needed for my short overnighters as they could be set up and packed away with ease, and not take up loads of space on the barrow. My initial tests with the rods were very positive; they were light, cast like a dream and had a forgiving action for playing fish despite being 3lb test. As the majority of my fishing is done on park lakes I’m often fishing pokey little swims, so the option of using them as 9ft rods was a major advantage.