You never know what’s round the next corner. A trip to Ludlow market on a freezing Monday morning brought me to the stall selling goods in aid of the Rojo Rojo orphanage in Kenya. All the items were hand made by the kids out there, and were beautiful, practical and, I felt, too cheap. I’d bought some wonderfully carved salad spoons when my eye fell on a clutch of catapults, crude but sturdy, as though they’d been made by Denis The Menace or Just William. “Go down well with anglers” the man on the stall said and, yes, of course they would, I immediately realised. For six quid this little beauty was mine.
A good cause I thought. And more sustainable perhaps? Mostly leather rather than plastic, and coming from Kenya rather than China, which might have saved a mile or a thousand too, I reckoned without checking. (Probably two thousand in actual fact.) But would it work?
I had some baiting up to do, so took it and my inevitable Nash boilies down to the river and, my my, work it did. Of course, the pouch can only take one 15mm bait at a time but they FLY! The contraption looks Heath Robinson but those Kenyan kids know something the rest of us don’t. Accuracy, range and, I guess, durability. Every box more than ticked.
Of course there are also occasions when putting in boilies singularly is a great advantage. One plop every minute is less likely to spook a fidgety barbel or carp than the blunderbuss attack of half a dozen boilies battering the swim half to death. I hope that catapult will be with me for several years for just these sticky situations. And to remind me we don’t know everything here in the West.
