The Traditional Fisherman's Forum

I believe they were used in conjunction with a "Jardine Spiral" weight? Does anybody still use these??

I use them occasionally under an old fashioned pike bung.

I haven't used mine for ages, but I used to get a lot of pike on them from rivers, despite the advice of most books which state they are useless for pike. I used the floating sort, in one of two ways. The simplest was to cast one out upstream and slightly beyond a visible pike lying in wait in very shallow water, and let it drift down past the fish. Once it was a few feet behind the pike you start winding in, which makes the minnow begin to work. The beauty of the Devon is that, unlike a plug, it won't dive or kick about and catch in weed, so you can direct the lure precisely so it swims up next to the pike and past its nose. The pike more often than not will snatch at it as though it hadn't eaten for months.

The other way was to paternoster a floating Devon on a four foot trace, with a lead on a link a foot or more long (depending on depth, weeds etc). The lead should just reach bottom and hold, with the minnow working away just off bottom, but a lift of the rod tip will allow it to drift a little downstream. This method was also effective for perch, chub and, once anyway, a rogue brown trout.