Hi there, my name is Henry and I am addicted to lure fishing rods. I think I know why but it doesn’t make the problem any easier.

I’ve been into fishing since my grandmother bought me a Woolworths starter kit for my 7th birthday and the next summer she took me trout fishing up in Scotland. Like many of you I am sure, I have very strong memories of the first fish I caught. My float went under and I struck so hard the unfortunate little wild brown trout went flying into the bracken behind me - but I was hooked as they say. We were fishing on a loch on my uncle’s estate up in Scotland and we were allowed to spin and float fish for trout because it was our first time at it. My cousin who I basically grew up with also got a Woolworths starter kit for his birthday, and he was on that summer holiday up in Scotland as well, but we are all made differently and for some reason he just never got fishing…………….

It’s pretty bloody obvious that we can’t go (sport) fishing without a fishing rod, and whilst I guess I have always been interested in the tools of our glorious trade, without a doubt it’s my getting so seriously into lure fishing which has seen that interest become what is without doubt a full blown addiction to lengths of carbon fibre. Many anglers are not really into the tackle side of things and that’s entirely up to them, and whilst the most important things in our saltwater fishing especially are the where and when, the how we do it fascinates me. When bait fishing was completely my thing I used to look at bass anglers and think they were a bit weird for obsessing so much about a fish that doesn’t get as big as say congers and cod and smoothhounds and so on. Even when I started getting into bass fishing and the lure fishing for bass really took over, I still had little idea that there could be so much to it - the one species of fish which doesn’t actually grow very big, but there are just so many interesting ways to go about fishing for them in so many different areas. I had no idea back then that one day I’d be moving between estuaries and surf beaches and shallow reefs and rocky headlands and mudflats and day and night and so on. What about boat or kayak fishing of course?

I remember being really interested in beachcasters, and back then I used to fish mainly with Conoflex and Daiwa rods. I never owned a Zziplex but they were often talked about in reverential terms, and these days I see a lot of the lads I know from my bait days using Century shore fishing rods which I understand are about as good as it gets. As I transitioned from bait fishing to lure fishing I missed the whole longer and easier to cast longer beachcaster thing, and match fishing was never my gig at all. A lot of my bait fishing revolved around using two rods with multiplier reels, and after casting my baits out the rods would go either in a tripod or down on the rocks - except for a lot of my mullet fishing. You obviously wait for the fish to come to you and for a lot of the time I was not actually holding my rod and reel combination. I liked them very much, don’t get me wrong, but I would never have classed my rod as an extension of my arm as such, and if the fishing was slow and I wasn’t changing my bait(s) very often I might not actually cast my rod or rods very much during the course of a session.

Now think about going out bass or wrasse or pollack fishing with lures. For a start you certainly are not putting your rod in a tripod and unless you are grabbing a drink or having a bit of a sit down you are essentially holding that rod and reel all the time. It’s a part of you. However slowly or subtly you might then be fishing a variety of lures, you are going to end up casting again and again and again through the course of a fishing session. So I would argue that you spend a lot more time getting to know your fishing rod in lure fishing. For sure I used to love a nice beachcaster, but because of the fishing I love doing now I end up actually using - casting and retrieving - my lure rod a lot more than I ever did a beachcaster. Back in the day I used to bait fish a hell of a lot, but those bait rods were very rarely cradled in my mitts for hours on end. This is not remotely about which is the better way to fish because that kind of argument is meaningless, rather it’s me trying to work out just why my addiction to playing around with lure rods has gotten quite so serious. Perhaps you have fished with more bass lure rods than I have over a few years now - tart! - and whilst my own obsessions don’t make me any more or less qualified to talk about lure rods than you, it does serve to increase my interest in what these lengths of carbon fibre can do for us, and how subtly different so many of them can be.

Which doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of trying to work out when and where to go chasing whatever species of fish you want to try and catch, but fishing tackle is a part of fishing and almost everything in fishing fascinates me. I might well have fished with any number of different lure rods and you might have thought that over time my interest would wane, but it hasn’t. I have got a couple of lure rods around the £100 mark which I know almost nothing about and which are arriving today for a look at and I am as interested to see what they are like as I am some samples which I am working on at the moment. We can obviously only actually fish with one lure rod at a time and how many rods do you actually need and all that, but that’s not the point for me and it doesn’t explain my addiction. I guess that through how so many of us choose to fish, that one length of carbon fibre that we end up holding onto sometimes for hours on end almost becomes a part of you. It doesn’t matter what the weather is doing or if it’s pitch black and you can’t see anything, you are still actually holding that fishing rod and reel and manipulating it time and time again to put your lures out there. You are not looking at a rod tip or waiting for a ratchet to start clicking, you are essentially chasing fish and a sign of interest from your prey either comes by feel through the rod or by visual means on a surface lure or something like that. In some respects your rod is like a radio and you need to react to the signals that come back to you through the rod rather than wait for the tip to signal a bite. I personally see a lot of parallels between fly fishing and lure fishing.

The ins and outs of fishing fascinate me and I make no apologies for it. I also refuse to let what seems to be a sad increase in online unpleasantness within fishing in any way affect my love for what we do. It’s absolutely incredible to see how these massive vaccination efforts require such a coming together of so many good people, and in some ways you have to hope that the shitshow we are living through right now will help to unite us more as human beings. Perhaps the male side of fishing combined with an increased level of cabin fever and frustration with our way of life at the moment is contributing towards the unpleasantness? Whatever the case, you will never see any of it on here and I consider myself very lucky that so many of you take the time to read these blog posts and communicate with me. You all have a good weekend, even if I wanted to try for the slimmest of chances February bass the weather has put paid to any of that, we will get through this…………...