Technology warefare on fish?
// January 17th, 2010 // Comments Off // Angles
When I started fishing some time ago, I was fishing small streams for catfish, haruan and climbing perch. This was in the summers in Negros Occidental. Fishing was uncomplicated. We always had our bamboo fences changed every summer, Bamboo slits were not hard to come by; I would just choose the straightest ones I could find, then that was that.
I asked anyone who would go to the Central Market to get me a few hooks and a bundle or two of line….
Sticky Drags and some surprises
I was working on one of me reels last night. It’s the post that you see on the sidebar – the sticky drag on the affinity 4000 was driving me nuts (it wasn’t REALLY that sticky, but I’m using it for light line, so everything matters to me…) It never really occurred to me how long it has been with me and that it was the first time I’m opening the reel that Penn describes as the first spinning reel that “doesn’t follow the tradition of looks of their usual line”.
If you don’t crack your reels open, then this wouldn’t really make sense to you…you see gears; big gears and cogs that drive the line winding machine that subdue piscatorial prey.
Not with this little devil though! In fact, its the first time I took the rotor off a reel and out came the worm shaft!
It suddenly occurred to me how it was able to muster a 21kg barramundi, The gears are small and precise, the anti reverse roller bearing is in the base of the rotor shaft; bearings pretty much floated the shaft just like the Shimano Stella, but the bearings were HUGE for such a small reel! It is way over engineered, the gears were made of Alloy and Stainless steel, something you find in most top end reels. Penn says that this reel targets the light tackle angler and IS braid ready. The price? about 7000 Pesos or so. Compare that to a Stella of the same size!
The technology that we have with us while fishing nowadays is mind boggling. Super braids as thin as our hair, reels that have drags rated for much higher tensile strength lines, rods that weigh nothing more than a sheet of bond paper – all of this give us an advantage. Are we really still fishing?
All this hardware bling gives us the technological advantage to subdue fish; it gives us the edge to subdue monsters with nothing more than a thin thread with rod tips the size of halved toothpicks, reels and terminal tackle that are overly engineered to a point where the only errors left are human errors and bad angler judgment – what strikes me as odd is the fact that new anglers are still finding a lot of excuses and they constantly blame their gear for lost fish.
Now is the time more than ever to start catching and releasing. If you realized how technology has improved our fish catching chances, then you should also realize that there is very little the fish can do to fight for it’s life.
…I really didn’t know the right knots to tie the hooks on the line with or how to attach the lines to the poles. It really didn’t matter that much – I was having the time of my life each and every single time I went to those streams. Later on, I discovered I could put cut up flip-flop sandal floats on my line to detect bites – A long and dry piece of bamboo was far more superior than the split bamboo that I was taking from our fence line. Later still, I learned to tie knots, had my first rod and reel, fished saltwater for the first time and the smile on my face when I first fired my 100 meter cast – The Daiwa long cast spool reels have finally come.