Sandy Nelson ponders tackle
Now I know there are some ironies in this piece, at various levels, but it does reveal the confusion and frustration I feel at times, in a world that just runs too fast and in your face for my wee brain.
Being a builder of rods, albeit on a much smaller scale than the big guns, part of the excitement and intrigue in shopping for a new rod has gone, however when I do go looking, I find the mainstream has increased its visibility dramatically and like many things in life these days, that increased visibility has come at the expense of romance and feeling.
20 years ago I picked up a copy of the Sage fly rod catalogue (I still have it), it was an alluring and romantic novel, even in soundbite format, illustrated by Dave Whitlock and waxing lyrical about the beautiful waters and exotic species that haunted my dreams and fantasies. Pitching advertising at those dreams by using suggestive drawings and inferring that each rod in your range is tuned to amplify your fishing experience under certain conditions and where every niche appeals to that inner child that makes it so important (a tip of the hat to Mr Gierach). It lived by my bedside and the tactile experience of turning pages while fantasising was always tinged with the naughtiness of those illicit moments of youth.
A modern rod catalogue is found online or delivered through my door every other month as part of a bigger catalogue, cold and calculating full of specs and alluding to power and technology and geared to sell. If we troll the web you can see review after review but usually we have pre-determind what it is we want, so we are just checking to see if there is nothing else that someone else thinks is better for the money; there is no romance, no wistful images that you could treat as bedtime reading. What images there are, are either superficial cosmetics or more usually photos of big fish in dramatic poses. Now drawings suck me in and stimulate my imagination, but photos despite being fantastic are always of someone else’s experience, it just doesn’t have the same effect (I’m happy being me, I don’t want to be someone else). The technical reviews cover distances and the subjective qualities of feel. What additional information we get is almost always technical, its all about CCS and ERN , modulus and action ratings that only rod geeks know or care about, and spend a lot of time arguing over. It just feels like another aspect of the modern world, where everything is geared towards selling me more stuff by making me feel clever knowing about the design and manufacture processes (much of which is largely waffle anyway).
Being exposed to lots of technical speak makes me switch off. I'm not sure about the rest of you but when I’m looking at new tackle I’m an easy sell, all you have to do is take me to the river and convince me I will have more fun or gain an edge by having something new. My most recent purchase was a second hand unused bamboo rod in which the maker's (who was selling a consignment rod he had built 25 years previously) description contained the phrase: I can practically hear the rod whisper "take me to the Delaware." Well that was me hooked, what followed was a search for pictures of the Delaware to see how like my own river it was, where I could imagine using the rod to chase big browns, the words haunted my dreams for weeks, the imagination sold me the rod. I just had to rescue the poor thing that “had only ever been cast on grass” and take it fishing for the first time in its life.
I offer demo rods to my prospective customers to take the rod and fish for a few days, I cannot find the words to wax lyrical in the right way and don’t like the jargon, so I choose to let the rods sell themselves. Getting to cast a rod is always the best way to find out what it is like, but it is not the easiest thing to do, especially if you are being sold electronically. More people seem to be switching to the romantic idea of getting a rod the way you would want it, an old school, high end purchase ethos, where you can have something handmade in a style you associate with, to do the kind of fishing that you enjoy. Perhaps this is a backlash due to having the money to spend but not having the imagination stimulated enough, to make you feel the rod will improve you experience and actually bring its value to your fishing.
It may be easier to get romantic about a handmade bamboo rod than a laser cut, computer designed man-made composite construction but I think if we changed the language of advertising and pitched at the imagination instead of the horizon, appealed to the fisherman rather than the geek, then our buying experience might return to a more exciting and pleasurable adventure more attuned to how we actually want to fish, rather than force feeding us something we only need in the form of an upgrade to the latest and greatest incarnation of the thing we already have. Since when did my fishing rod become a mobile phone?
