Fishing Rod Kits

Gone Fishing

GONE FISHIN’

It’s summer time, and the living is easy. Well, maybe not easy, but it’s too hot to work outside in the yard, and our water has been rationed because of the drought. So I figured that with water levels dropping, all the fish would have to be more densely packed into the resulting smaller areas of the rivers, creeks and streams. As an opportunist and a dedicated fisherman, it seemed like a good time to get the dirt dauber nests off my spinning rod, clean up the reel, sort through the old tackle box, and slide off to Lady Bird Park in Fredericksburg to see if I could reduce the fish population and provide some fresh seafood for the larder.

The spinning rod, made of several exotic materials (some of which I can’t pronounce) and which guaranteed me long, accurate casts and sure-fire hook-setting, had, alas, seen better days. A couple of years of exposure to salt water combined with 14 months of storage in the large oven I refer to as my “barn,” had rendered the rod almost useless. It worked for a few days as a stake for one of my tomato plants, but then the wind picked up to 15 knots one day and broke the carbon fibre/polyunsaturated/hyperattenuated fishing stick right in half. “I’ll have better luck with the reel. That sucker was made for salt water, all the bearing races are sealed against the environment, and the finish was sold to me as ‘bullet-proof.’” thought I. Turns out that’s not exactly how it worked out. The little case they sold me to keep the reel in, which was made of felt, had attached itself (vulcanized, I think would be the proper word) to the bullet-proof finish and the 80 yards of invisible, ever-soft, non-fouling 10 pound monofilament line. By the time I got through peeling and scraping off the remnants of the felt cover, the reel looked like I had dragged it behind my truck for a week. And the handle wouldn’t turn, therefore the spindle wouldn’t turn, and I couldn’t adjust the drag, and when I tried to unlock it to pull the line off, the little gizmo that does the unlocking sheared off in my hand. I broke out my jeweler’s screwdrivers to take the reel apart (have you ever tried to figure out where the manufacturers get so many tiny, soft screws for assembly?), and quickly broke one screw off flush with the housing, then destroyed the blade of the only screwdriver that was the right size for the task at hand. So much for the reel.