Tackle & Tactics

12 October 2009	Quantum PT and Fin-Nor come to town THE Australian Tackle Show, held every August on the east coast and a trade-only affair, saw two significant brand additions this year.  Read more
12 October 2009	Harvey’s angling epiphany THERE was a motoring article published in The West Australian a little while ago in which the author described experiencing ‘motoring epiphanies’ – lots of them. I know what he meant; I’ve had a few of them myself.  Read more
23 August 2009	Come sail away I'VE told the story of my first-ever sailfish hookup a few times over the years, but I don't think I've ever consigned it to print. So here goes.  Read more
10 April 2009	Con's the lord of the rings SQUID are an amazing creature. If only fish grew as fast, were as prolific, could be caught at any time of day or night and were as easy to clean. Squid mostly live less than two years, grow phenomenally quickly, breed in their billions and school. They constitute something approaching one percent of the total biomass on Earth.  Read more
02 December 2008	Stuart’s rollers still best I STILL have the first rod I ever bought with roller guides. It’s 30-odd years old now, and it’s not particularly good compared to the current crop, but along the way it became a legendary classic: a Fenwick HMG graphite ten-kilo game rod, with a swaged stainless butt, chrome Varmac two-piece reel seat, and chrome roller guides. It was one of the first-ever graphite rods, and Fenwick was the name.  Read more
18 October 2008	Plastics still fantastic THERE’S been a gradual change in the soft lures business that most of you won’t have perceived I reckon, but it pulls me up every time I go to write about them now.  Read more
24 August 2008	Going around in circles HOW anybody came up with a fish hook design where the point points straight back at the shank of the hook, I couldn’t hazard a guess. It defies logic that when your line is pulling in one direction, that the hook point should be at something around right angles to that line of pull.  Read more
09 June 2008	drag reels - the low down I RECKON you could win a lot of money around the campfire on most fishing trips. Hand somebody a rod and reel, line through the guides, drag set, and bet them how much drag they’re putting on.  Read more
25 March 2008	Coming to grips with outriggers OUTRIGGERS. Long poles that fit up to the sides of your boat and perform several tasks: they allow you to troll more lines; they elevate the lines for better surface lure/bait presentation; they spread your baits or lures farther apart; they allow some automatic line drop back; they give you somewhere to hang flags from and they make your boat look better.  Read more
25 January 2008	Southern salmon sorties IT’S nearly salmon time again. For those of us who live in the metro area anyway, and the nature of the beast means that’s most of us, another couple of months will hopefully see something of a repeat of the awesome salmon seasons of 2006 and 2007.  Read more
22 November 2007	Japanese jigging innovation PINK snapper are one of the most widespread species we fish for. In addition to almost all Australian waters, ‘squirefish’ (as they are known as internationally) are found in the waters of Taiwan, Indonesia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, a fair bit of the south-west Pacific, the Philippines and – most importantly for this Tackle & Tactics column – Japan.  Read more
22 September 2007	GTs no longer lowly I FIRST went seriously popper-chucking for giant trevally (GTs) in 1980. I was with Richard Cooper and Craig Radford, and we had maybe all caught GTs along the way before that; but this was the trip to GT Mecca.  Read more
18 July 2007	Shimano raising the bar ONE of the things I find interesting about the fishing tackle business is the steady proliferation of quality tackle available to us all. Every once in a while there’s a quantum leap, an innovation that we didn’t see coming and that changes the future...  Read more
23 May 2007	Why PE ratings cut the BS BRAIDED gel-spun polyethylene fibres – the line you know as braid – is now well and truly entrenched into the fishing tackle armoury of millions of anglers worldwide.  Read more
02 April 2007	Electric dreams run deep I HEARD a funny story the other day, which I’ll now embellish and report as the truth. It won’t be too far from it. Two anglers keen on catching wahoo and tuna around a far-flung Australian outpost just received their new bit of kit: a nice big overhead reel, and a flash fully-rollered mini-bent-butt game rod that not only looked the part, but was actually almost ideal for their purposes.  Read more
27 February 2007	Make the switch to barbless SERIOUS question: Why do fish hooks have barbs? Before reading on, go ahead and answer it. Done?  Read more
10 July 2006	Changing latitudes, attitudes ANOTHER winter passes, and despite the added fuel burden this year, tens of thousands – maybe hundreds of thousands – of anglers head north from Perth for a little or a long stint in warmer climes. Maybe more than last year, more than the year before. The Abrolhos, Shark Bay, Carnarvon, Quobba, Gnaraloo, Coral Bay, Exmouth and on and on.   Read more
16 May 2006	William was master of angler’s fate THIS column is about the 110th anniversary of the invention of the level-wind baitcasting reel. Had I known that 10 years ago, I probably would have written it up for its centenary. Actually I think maybe I did. Doesn’t matter, there’s more to the story.  Read more
16 March 2006	Walking in a Daiwa Wonderland IT IS funny the things some people want to visit in their travels. I know some people whose life won’t be complete until they’ve seen the Eiffel Tower, which I have no interest in at all. Others who have a pressing need to go see Gracetown. Spare me. Anywhere in Scotland? Not on my list. Daiwa’s reel factory in Japan? Now you’re talking!  Read more
27 November 2005	Sunglasses: more than meets the eye MOST anglers wear sunglasses most of the time, even when they’re not fishing. Actually that could extend to most people, these days. There are a lot of pairs of sunglasses out in the world. So what sunglasses are the best?   Read more
08 October 2005	New reels highlight of US expo I WENT fishing on a hot day, the other day. I was in Las Vegas with a few mates for the annual US Tackle Show, or the International Convention of Allied Sportfishing Trades (ICAST), as it is more correctly called.  Read more
01 August 2005	Bimini still best shock absorber I HAD a couple of bust-offs the other day. One was on braid, the other on nylon. I think I had leaned a little heavy on the drag with the nylon, and it was only eight kilo up against a mackerel doing the million-mile-an-hour thing, so I deserved it.  Read more
05 June 2005	IGFA ensures world records above board YOU PROBABLY wouldn’t have to look far in a tackle store to find the letters ‘IGFA’ on an item of tackle; very likely on a spool of line, maybe on a rod or reel. I wonder how many anglers know what they stand for, or if they have ever paused to wonder.  Read more
04 April 2005	Targeting tuna: match the hatch THERE’S an expression commonly used in fishing the world over, that came out of trout fishing somewhere along the way: “matching the hatch”. It refers to fly fishing streams or lakes that are experiencing insect larvae hatches, and the necessity to use a fly that matches the insect hatch to stand a chance of enticing a trout to bite.  Read more
02 February 2005	How many upmarket ball bearings can you have? THOSE of you who spend as much time reading the advertisements in fishing magazines as you do the text will have surely noticed by now that ‘the next big thing’ in fishing reels is ball bearings that don’t corrode as easily as they used to.  Read more
22 December 2004	Revamp for braid, and Gulp! –there’s more IT DOESN’T seem like 12 months since I wrote up the 2002 ICAST show, which is what most people would think of as the US Tackle Show. I’ve just been through the 2003 show, and followed it up with tours of the Plano tackle box factory in Illinois, the Berkley line and lure factory in Iowa, and the Minn Kota electric outboard factory in Minnesota. All in 11 days, including a 39-hour return trip to Perth. Just as well I took notes  Read more
01 October 2004	Silver paint job will just draw a blank I HAD another guy in the shop the other day wanting one of those aluminium rods. I don’t know how long ago it was that I was first asked for one, but it would have been not long after somebody came up with the idea of painting a fibreglass rod with metallic silver paint.  Read more
01 August 2004	Sipe and don’t slip on rock, reef or boat MANY, many years ago, there was a photo of yours truly published in a well-read fishing magazine, perched on a precarious rock high above a swell-swept ocean, wearing what a lot of Australians know as “Chinese safety boots”; and I don’t think they were even double-pluggers.  Read more
04 June 2004	Nylon, braid,but wait – there will be Zylon THEY SAY if you can’t blind them with science, baffle them with something else. No worries. I’m going to blind you with science. Fishing line: the only thing connecting you to the fish.  Read more
01 April 2004	Wahoo – a fish you could name a boy after OBSERVANT WAngler readers will have noticed a small display ad in the back of a couple of issues late last year, offering a six-metre boat for sale on Christmas Island – and a commercial fishing licence too, if you want. It might still be for sale.  Read more
20 February 2004	Welcome to the tackle box town of Plano… REGULAR readers will know I get enthused about pretty much anything to do with the fishing tackle industry, and that I recently did a quick tour of a few factories in the USA. So forgive me this once if this column doesn’t have a lot to do with how to catch fish; but I have to tell you about some of the cool stuff I’ve seen, particularly at a little town in the American mid-west, called Plano..  Read more
22 October 2003	21 steps to rigging for serious jigging LET ME put this simply: deepwater jigging is a great way to fish, and if you haven’t already given it a go, you’re missing out. It has, quite seriously, revitalised my interest in bottom fishing, and there’s no way I’ll head west of Fremantle without a seriously heavy roll-up jig bag in the boat these days. I doubt even the Rottnest ferry would be excepted.  Read more
27 August 2003	Tiburon survives a summer of samsons THREE YEARS ago here, we detailed some history of two-speed game reels, finishing with Penn’s International 70 big game reel, which was about to be released..  Read more
06 June 2001	Over the hill, via the stern, but one heck of an angler I PICKED up a great video a couple of years back called Cockpit Chaos, which was put together by a gamefishing crew known around the traps as the “Over-the-Hill Gang”. They’re a mob of 70+-year-olds who fish in some of the best places in the world, in this case Madeira, on a game boat called Chunda, and they really know their stuff..  Read more
27 April 2001	All stowed away–boxed, wrapped & bagged THERE’S a revolution in fishing tackle that has crept up on us virtually unnoticed, and this could be a timely Wangler to shove it under your nose, what with Father’s Day looming. Doesn’t matter if you don’t have kids and/or you’re female; your father would approve of you buying something nice for yourself, so that’s the main thing. It’s tackle storage systems, or what we called tackle boxes up until a few years ago..  Read more
27 February 2001	Ultra-light option sure beats filling the freezer HALF of this column is dedicated to the ultra-heavy spin brigade, which for some reason brought to mind the opposite end of the scale. Ultra-light spinning gear is booming in popularity, which is great to see. So is the fly fishing scene, game fishing, and lure fishing in general. It means more anglers are enjoying fishing as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end..  Read more