The Alternative Angler – New Year, New Gear

Never mind smelling the flowers, don’t forget to take time out to see the satirical side of fishing life and grab a laugh along the way as well. So here’s a regular column from Kevin Perkins to remind us that life is for laughing at, or taking the p*** out of, whenever we can.

Well, by now you’ve probably had the last of the turkey curry, there are only orange and coffee flavoured sweets left rattling around amongst the empty wrappers in the bottom of the giant selection tin, and the almost full bottle of Advocaat has been returned to the darkest depths of the drinks cupboard now that granny has finally gone home. Time to get out all that shiny new gear that Santa bought you, (or maybe not) and install it into its rightful place in your burgeoning tackle collection.

Now, any angler of a few years’ standing will not have received anything ‘new’ as such. He will always be careful to ask his loved ones to get him ‘replacements’ for items that are worn out, no longer up to the job, getting a bit tatty, etc, etc. You know the routine, it is no good putting a £ 700 pole on your Xmas list ‘Just because you want one’; us poor males would have a very hard job to justify that. I mean it’s not an essential like shoes or handbags, is it?

To get what you want you have to spend hours trying to patch up a cracked pole section on the kitchen table, using copious amounts of superglue and gaffer tape, with much sucking of teeth and comments like, “That should hold for another season or two, if I’m lucky, the old girl hasn’t done bad, but you can’t get the parts any more, not with it being so old…”

A £ 400 baitboat may seem an inordinate extravagance to someone outside our sport, but remember to mention how your shoulder started to play up after you did all that decorating. You went fishing a couple of times after that, but it wasn’t much fun, what with you not being able to cast out to where the fish were. And, to be honest, It’s not really worth you going any more if you are just going to blank every time, is it?

So, having been ever so slightly devious and getting what you wanted, does your new acquisition become your favourite toy straight away? Lets’ face it, we all have favourite items of tackle, the one thing that always comes out of the box or bag, regardless of whether or not it is exactly the right piece of equipment for the fishing you are doing, out comes ‘Old faithful, to the exclusion of almost everything else, at times.

For example, it’s probably fair to say that we have all had a favourite float at some time or another. Maybe harking back to our younger days when your favourite float was your only float. Stillwaters, rivers, lakes, ponds, no matter what, that float was pressed into service, and if, by some misfortune, it ended 15 feet up in a bankside tree, real salty tears would mourn its loss. And who amongst you reading this can’t say that tucked away somewhere you still have a float that you haven’t used for years, and are not ever likely to again, but one that you can’t bear to be parted with? It is just one of those pieces of tackle that by its very presence has the ability to somehow rekindle fond memories of fishing trips gone by.

This affection is not extended to many other items of terminal tackle. I don’t know of many anglers who go all warm and fuzzy over their favourite coffin leger, or get misty eyed when they recall a rodrest top that brings back particularly vivid memories of memorable captures.

Any game fisherman will always have a favourite fly, and that usually ends up getting pride of place in their fishing hats, after giving sterling service. Lure fishermen like me, on the other hand, well that’s where things are a bit different……..

We have favourites, for sure, but this relationship never tends to be long term. The reason is that when you have first tried every other lure in your box in order to churn the water in front of you into something resembling cappuccino, but to no avail, out comes old faithful. Tentatively at first, you don’t want to lose it, but then the casts get a little nearer that bush/overhanging tree on the far bank. Your countdown lengthens from beginning to retrieve almost before it hits the water, to a couple of seconds, then five, then just a bit longer and then……

Oh well, it wasn’t working anyway, time to get a new favourite! I still have some lures that are years old, not because they are favourites, just because I tend not to use them much. Something about the pattern or colour or action that I just don’t have confidence in. Then there are others that I replace as a matter of course, because I always give them a whirl, and yet never had much success.

A prime example of this would be Abu’s Toby, a real enigma of a lure to me. Looks good, casts like a bullet, great action in the water, doesn’t break the bank if you lose the odd one and yet…….. the number of fish I have caught using them will be in the tens rather than hundreds. Many years ago there was a very, very similar lure to the Toby distributed by Gladding (remember them?) and marketed under the ‘Flectolite’ banner that was altogether more attractive to fish. I was so puzzled that in a crude experiment I peeled the diffraction tape off of a Flectolite and stuck it on a Toby, but to no avail, the Flectolite still got more takes even when it was ‘naked’ and yet if you stripped both lures of their hooks and swivels, the blanks looked almost identical.

I do have a real favourite in my Plano boxes though, in the shape of the Mepps range. And by this I mean proper Mepps, not somebody’s imitation of. If I had to limit myself to one type of lure for the rest of my fishing days I wouldn’t be without the spinner that causes pike, perch and chub to attack it with a ferocity that would befit someone trying to stop a mugger making off with their granny’s pension book. Of course, that’s just my opinion……