Ben Jailler looks for some where to store his fishing gear along with his fishing snacks. Does he find what he's looking for?
The advent of Freeview and streaming services like Netflix have changed the way we watch television. I no longer slavishly consult the TV guide and plan my evening’s viewing according to whims of the schedulers. Instead sit down when I want and either watch something I’ve recorded, find something on iPlayer, binge-watch a box set or, if it’s in the twenty minutes between getting my daughter to bed and me grabbing some dinner, I channel flick.
Like the way I watch television, the way I carry my fly fishing equipment has also been changing over the seasons. I predominantly fish small reservoirs where the key for me has always been mobility. I like to travel light and don’t want to be weighed down by anything unnecessary - casting and moving until I find fish.
As such, I’ve never been a fan of taking a tackle bag onto the bank, being encumbered by a fixed-head landing net that is always 30 yards away when I need it or lugging around a bass bag of dead fish. My preferred outfit was a fishing vest with a folding landing net attached to a D-ring at the back and any trout I’m fortunate enough to catch, returned from whence they came alive, thank you very much.
For me it became a tale of two vests: a Loop Opti vest for river fishing or evening sessions and a Vision Carabou vest, which could hold multiple reels, spools, fly boxes and sustenance for a full day’s reservoir fishing. However, I was never entirely satisfied with either set-up. Although the larger vest could hold a flask of coffee, sausage roll, Snickers bar and a packet of Flaming Hot Monster Munch, I tend to hold my hands low when retrieving and I found that the two horizontal bottom pockets containing my fly boxes were always getting in the way. Whereas the Loop Opti fly vest happily stored my fly boxes out of harm’s way in three vertical front chest pockets, its lack of storage meant I had to supplement it with the addition of a small Brady Bag to carry my lunch in.
While abandoning the TV guide has certainly been liberating, it also has its drawbacks. Actively searching for something to watch on iPlayer is one thing, but channel flicking in the vain hope of finding anything watchable on Freeview is another. It’s a bit like flogging to death the same stretch of water, with the same fly, hour after hour and yet somehow expecting a trout to miracle itself onto the end your line.
The problem with channel flicking is that I’m invariably flicking at the same time each night and coming across the same films, on the same channel, at exactly the same part in the plot. One week it was Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (the bad robot us’s slam-dunking their heads into a waste basket), another week it was Die Hard (John McClane dropping Marco’s body onto the cop car) and more recently it’s been Highlander (right at the end of the movie when Connor MacLeod undergoes the ‘quickening’ and utters the much, misquoted line: “There can be only one”).
It was a similar desire that “there can be only one” that lay behind my purchase of a sling pack last January. Over the course of the previous season, I’d found myself constantly switching fly patches, nippers, zingers, floatant, sinkant and leader material between the two vests. This was to my sanity what John McClane was to a skyscraper full of Euro-terrorists and where my dream of finding a single system for carrying all my fishing equipment began to take hold.
With my fly fishing vest rapidly going the way of the TV guide, I started by looking at alternative solutions to the vest or vest/bag conundrum: chest packs had even more upfront than my Vision vest; I wasn’t planning on going camping so a backpack seemed excessive; lumbar packs were too small, hip packs too low; and there was no way I was going to wear anything called a bra.
And then like Goldilocks’ moment of epiphany when she came across baby bear’s Furniture and Breakfast Emporium, to my eye the Simms Headwaters Sling Pack was “just right.” It had enough space to swallow everything I needed, with the added bonus of the freedom of movement it allowed when wearing it out of the way on your back. Plus it looked pretty damn cool. I was sold.
In terms of practicality, the transition from fly vest to sling pack wasn’t as straight forward as I’d anticipated. First off, I soon realised that the D ring attached to the top of the strap was too small to hang my landing net from, but that problem was resolved by fitting a spare carabiner to the D ring.
There was also an issue with the tool ports for snippers, forceps etc. These were on the left hand side of the fold down work bench, which meant reaching across the tool bench with your right hand to use my nippers or forceps. And while on the subject of forceps, I lost three pairs in the early part of the season due to them falling out of the tool ports (including the magnetic one on the strap). Again the solution lay in customising the sling pack. All I did was pin a retractor to the mesh panel on the right of the work bench for my nippers and pinch the forceps on there too.
Despite going for the smaller version, over the twelve months that I’ve been using the sling pack, I’ve never found it wanting for storage space. The main compartment provides enough space for spare reels or spools, a priest and all the snacks a middle-aged child needs; while the two interior mesh pockets have easily held all of my fly boxes. There’s also a smaller exterior compartment on the front that holds my notebook, pen and fishing licence. Although, the sling pack comes with a removable tippet holder and double floatant holder, I’ve found them impractical and instead keep my tippets, floatant, sinkant and a velcro-backed fly patch in the work bench.
Yet paradoxically, the biggest advantage of the sling pack has also proved to be its biggest drawback. The major selling point of the sling pack is that everything is behind you. The freedom of movement this gives you is wonderful, but I’ve never entirely got used to having to stop and swing everything around when I need to change a fly or tie a new leader.
Don’t get me wrong - I love the notion of the workbench. And discovering that it’s possible to lie your fly rod along the length of the sling pack, leaving you with both hands free to change flies, has been a revelation, but….. But. But. But.
Like the TV guide, the fly vest was ever only created for one thing. Everything is up front and exactly right where and when you need it. Like a maddening itch behind your eyeballs, that lack of immediacy with the sling pack just won’t go away and is why my search for the one carry system that does it all will continue.
And what will happen when I finally find it? Will I undergo my own version of the quickening and, like Connor MacLeod, gain the ability to read peoples’ thoughts and use the gift to encourage cooperation and peace in mankind?
All I want is something I can hang my nippers on and stop my Monster Munch from getting squashed. Is that really too much to ask?