Glossary of coarse fishing terms

Bait & feeding

• Hookbait — The bait you actually attach to your hook (e.g. a single maggot, a piece of corn).
• Loose feed — Free offerings of bait — pellets, maggots, casters — fired or thrown into your swim to draw fish in.
• Groundbait — A mix of crumbs, meals, and additives that's wetted, balled up and thrown or cupped in to attract and hold fish.
• Cupping — Placing bait into the swim using a long pole-mounted cup for accuracy.
• Catapult — A small slingshot used to fire loose feed out beyond your reach.

Rigs & terminal tackle

• Rig — The arrangement of mainline, hooklength, hook, float or feeder you fish with.
• Hooklength — A short length of finer line between your mainline (or feeder) and the hook.
• Hair rig — A short hair of line off the hook bend used to mount hard baits like boilies or pellets without piercing them.
• Method feeder — A frame feeder loaded with sticky groundbait, with a short hooklength buried in the mix.
• Cage feeder — An open-cage feeder used to deliver loose groundbait into your swim.
• Waggler — A float attached bottom end only, used for open water and stillwaters.
• Stick float — A trotting float used on flowing water, attached top and bottom.
• Pole elastic — Hollow elastic threaded through a pole's top sections that absorbs the lunges of hooked fish in place of a reel.

Venue features

• Peg — A numbered fishing position, especially on commercial fisheries and match venues.
• Swim — The area of water you're fishing.
• Margin — The narrow strip of water close to the bank.
• Far bank — The bank opposite the one you're fishing from.
• Snag — Any underwater obstruction (sunken branch, weed bed, etc.) that can break a line.

Equipment

• Keepnet — A long mesh net suspended in the water that holds your fish alive until the end of the session for weighing.
• Landing net — A short-handled net used to scoop hooked fish out of the water.
• Disgorger — A small tool used to remove a hook from a fish's mouth safely.

Match terms

• Draw — The peg you've been allocated for a match (drawn at random before the start).
• All in — The signal that a match has started and you may begin fishing.
• All out — The signal that a match has finished and you must stop fishing.
• Weigh-in — The end-of-match process of weighing each angler's keepnet to determine the result.