One of the great delights of angling is its essential reliance on a wide range of equipment, bits and pieces, rods and reels, that allow for catalog browsing, armchair fiddling and yes – a wealth of pleasure on the bank-side. I sometimes wonder what a runner gets out of his or her sport – they do not have shops and leaflets full of shiny sport fishing tackle to gloat over – they just get on with their running!
To be honest I do understand what the runners achieve, but for me I need a hobby that allows me the extra interest of collecting items associated with it. Fishing tackle ranges from expensive items to individual hooks and weights costing next to nothing. Therefore, it is a sport that can satisfy the tackle hoarding nature of everybody, rich or poor.
It is even a pleasure browsing through used fishing tackle on eBay or at car boot sales. I am always on the look out for items of value, that I can polish up and put on my shelf in my study. However, it is fishing tackle shops where the most pleasure is to be had. I can spend a morning in one, hoping that the shop is not busy so that I can bend the proprietor’s ear. I probably end up buying more items of tackle than I really need, particularly when I like to travel light when I actually do go fishing!
Although I am a coarse angler and occasional sea angler, my biggest preference is for fly fishing. Perusing fly fishing tackle gives the tackle tart the most scope. This is for two reasons – there are a lot of very high quality and expensive pieces of equipment on the market to drool over – and there are thousands of different fishing fly patterns each only costing a little to buy.
Choosing sport fishing tackle is a little like a child in a sweet shop! What to look at next? But it is the nature of the angler that has allowed the fishing tackle trade to flourish over the past few decades, even through a number of recessionary ‘blips’ in the economy. There is a huge industry now that has sprung up, particularly in China where a lot of high quality factories are producing some very capable equipment. However, the best fishing tackle by far is still manufactured in the UK and USA. The trouble is the costs in these countries are much higher and the resulting retail prices are always so much more than the equivalent Asian imports. They still sell though, and this a tribute to both the quality of our home produced goods and the satisfaction of owning the best.