A depository for information on the history of fishing tackle.

 At  the last Phillips sale I was surprised to see the appearance of a spring loaded hook. This particular one was Swedish and I first came across this hook in the early 1970’s when I was doing my arctic warfare training in Norway. The idea was to bait the hook with a small baitfish, lower it into an ice hole and wait for a large pike to take the offering. Thus providing a meal, that was the theory.

Eagle Claw Hook

During the last year or so I have  come across other spring loaded hooks and  decided to do a little bit of digging to find what was available to the  researcher.

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Another scarce Hardy creel that I recently had the pleasure to come across was the Curragh. I had never seen it before and to be perfectly honest I did spend some time looking at it and trying to decide if it was Hardy.

Hardy Curragh Creel

The reason for this was that I could not find the Hardy name anywhere on it. Eventually it was pointed out to me and I was surprised.

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The emergence of the Hardy Drop knife at auction recently caused plenty of discussion amongst some of my close collecting friends. Once the auction was over there was even more, mainly due to the fact that it sold for £3,200 certainly a record price for an angling knife.

Hardy drop knife

I was asked by various people why so much? The simple answer is that two people wanted it. I heard various reasons and various estimates as to how old it was and even read somewhere that it was circa 1910. Nothing beats a little research so here is the almost complete story of Hardy Drop Knife.

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I will be at the Romsey Tackle Fair this sunday details below.

March 8th 2009 – The Romsey Tackle Fair, Romsey, UK

Romsey Community School, Greatbridge Road, Hants, SO518ZB

9am – 3pm, £2 entry, Tables £30, free parking, refreshments/tea/coffee/fresh rolls available

For more information contact Steve Draper

Email: stevethecreel@hotmail.co.uk, Tel: 02380 739921

I was asked if I was interested in doing a book review for Classic Angling, I was and it was published in issue 63 January 2010.

Click on the thumbnails for a better view.

Book review

Book review

There has recently been much discussion on the Ustonson reel featured in Graham Turners book Fishing Tackle The Ultimate Collectors Guide. Graham Turners view was expressed in Classic Angling. In the next issue they published an article by Micheal Brabin expressing his views and this was followed by Roger Still two months later.

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Mullocks next auction will take place at the Clive Pavillion Ludlow on Saturday 20th March with 780 lots of tackle.

I was speaking to a friend recently who was looking to collect something “different”, well he could start with a Walker Bampton Wallace Watson reel. These unusual reels sell for anything between £200 and £300 and I think there are only three models to collect.

Wallace Watson Reel

 For further details and the online catalogue follow the link below.

Mullocks Auction

James William Young

James William Young was born in Redditch in 1870. His father William Young joined the firm of Samuel Allcock in 1874 as a tin maker. In addition to making boxes and cans he also made the tin lining for packing cases.

Three months after his arrival he was the company’s principle reel maker. However because of his tinsmith duties he would often come into work at three o’clock in the morning to make the various tins, boxes and other items required of him before starting on the reels.

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In the 1907 catalogue the model 413 had changed sizes to fall in line with the rest of the reel models, as per the list in the first part of this article. This reel was a single action model and in later years would be called the Cascapedia, named after the North American River. This was also the name that Hardy Brothers would use for their ebonite multiplier introduced in the 1930’s. [Read more →]

I recently bought a quantity of reels at Angling Auctions for a friend. He was only interested in two of them and so we came to an agreement regarding the other four. Three were nothing special but one was intriguing.

Called the Expert it was made by the River Company in Gothenburg Sweden, this company was in turn owned by Malte Blohm.

The River Expert Reel

I started to play around with the reel and eventually decided to dismantle it. What I found was amazing and gradually I formed an opinion of how it worked. After cleaning and reassembling the reel I thought it was time to put some line on and try it out. [Read more →]