I used to fish rip-rap some, and if ya wanted to fish on the bottom, it was just about a guarantee that you were gonna hang up. Rigging so the sinker would break off was something ya could do, and using old spark plugs was a substitute for lead. It was handy to know a mechanic.
I quit bottom fishing, and went to slip corks, or just rigging without much weight and bouncing the bait off the rocks like you would using jigs. It takes alot of casting up stream and bouncing the bottom back down, winding back in and casting again.....just like jig fishing. You still hang up now and then, but you get to where you can develope a feel for the bottom structure, and not hang near as much as you'd think. Also, you can find eddys to fish with the slip cork, where the current isn't as strong.
I have a buddy that fishes below Keystone alot. He needs to make some long casts to reach the areas where fish are holding, often several hundred feet. He's also the Oklahoma state distance casting champion.
He uses custom rods of around 14 feet, and an Ambassadeur 7500 reel. He rigs up with a heavy shock leader of somewhere around 70 pound test, not positive, but it's some heavy stuff. The leader goes about twice the length of the rod . It's to keep his line from breaking when he torques up for a long cast with a weight of 3 or more ounces tied to the end of his line. Behind that heavey leader, he uses lighter line, something around 15 pound test, again, I'm not positive of the test.
He invented a little deal he calls a sinker sacrificer. If he just tied a lighter line to his sinker, it would break off because of the force of the cast, and more than likely kill somebody across the river. His heavy leader is tied to the device. A light breakable line is tied to the other end of the device, and the light line is tied to a loop of the heavy leader material, and the weight tied to the end of that.
Now when he gets ready to cast, he hangs the loop of heavy line with the weight tied on on a notch of his little invention, makes the cast, the loop comes off when the weight hits the water, and then there's the light breakable line between the device and the weight. When the weight hangs up, it will break off, and he saves his hook which is up on the heavy leader, often with a fish on it, and his little sinker sacrificer is still attached to the tip end of his leader.
I don't know if I explained the deal where you can visualize it or not, but it's a neat little deal, and works well for his needs.
He's invented a couple of other devices, and he was featured in a fishing magazine a year or two ago, but they screwed up the pictures of his inventions, by drawing them all wrong.
