Rods

Mark Twain got it right on the button: "Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size."

The loss of a treasured rod provides solid support for Mr. Twain's contention.

Largely as a legacy from my days in the tackle business, I still own over 30 rods of various flavours, shapes and sizes. Most of them I have not used for years – probably will not use them for years ¬– but I have just got to hang on to them all. Never know when I will need that very particular rod for that special trip. But there are amongst all these rods a select few that have become my favourites. I guard these rods with an almost fanatical zeal. I will tell you why.

Some rods just fit. It is a bit like an old pair of shorts. Sure they are old; sure they have been covered in mud, blood and beer, but throw them out? Never! Not as long as they can still walk out from the bottom of the wardrobe where you have to hide them from your wife. Some rods are like that. Cover them in bait, bang them on the deck, bend them on fish – they still come back for more. They simply feel great; the perfect tool for the job.
A good rod is hard to find. Every year the shops fill up with the latest whizzo rods that the marketing wizards tell us will be the next big breakthrough in fishing. Rods so sensitive a whitebait breaking wind 60 metres below the surface could be felt like the blow of a seven-pound sledgehammer. A rod with the power to lift the first and second mortgage off a house; a rod that could cast a bait, lure or fly into the future. And we buy them!

We buy the rods and we use them for a while. Then slowly but surely you notice that the old favourite starts to slide into its old position in your hands. The whizzo rod spends more and more time in the rod rack. When you find an old favourite rod, guard it with your life. But even that may not be enough!

My first old favourite was a split-cane fly rod. My first. I can still remember that Christmas morning, now 40 years and a few ago. The rod, free of its gaudy wrapping and its canvas bag, lay on the end of my parents’ bed. The muted glow of the oiled and varnished split-cane fly rod as I pulled it from cloth rod bag was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

‘Uncle’ Norm’s patient tutoring built my skills to the point where I could cast a reasonable length line, sufficient to fish the smallish water around Canterbury. Until now I had fished with gear borrowed from Norm. Borrowed gear has none of the charm of gear that is yours. Constantly using your own rod allows you to become acutely familiar with its characteristics, and the best ways to elicit the responses you require.

Over the next three years, the rod and me were constant companions on the rivers. Most often I was on my own, cycling or bussing, to the rivers near Christchurch. Occasionally, Norm or my parents were persuaded to take me further afield, to the Waimakariri Gorge or the Waitaki. Throughout this period, I fished with this one rod. It was my most treasured possession.

During my 17 year my family moved to Auckland. The rod moved with me and into the back of my wardrobe. There it stayed, in the back of a variety of wardrobes, through the rest of my teens, through courtship and marriage – for ten years. A growing family, a growing career, and growing distance to trout fishing left that rod languishing. But at least once every year the rod was dragged out, rubbed down, and promises were made to take it fishing, ‘real soon’.

One day in mid-November, toward hometime, I received a tearful phone call from my wife.

“You won't believe what your son Mark has done,” she wailed (as a brief aside, it has been a constant source of mystery to me that whenever the kids are in trouble, they kids become ‘mine’, not ‘ours’.)

“What on earth has he done this time,” I asked.

“I am too upset to talk about it, you can deal with it, he’s your son – you can sort it out...”

Further discussion seemed pointless so I hurried the one or two miles home. What had been done was all too obvious the moment I turned the car down the driveway. The driveway was littered with the flower heads of roses. It got worse. As I turned the corner into the garden proper, the evidence of the carnage increased. Flower heads littered the garden. Branches of the rose bushes and other plants were bent, battered and broken. The roses of a rose garden my wife had built that had become famous enough to feature on TV garden shows and in books and magazines.

Maryan was pacing up and down, staccato outbursts of, “How could you...? Why...? What got into you...? My beautiful roses...” and the like were directed at my cowering son. It was only then I noticed the two items in Maryan’s hands. In one was a rod tip-section, in the other the butt-section, the ends flayed out – my rod, my beautiful rod.

My son, enamoured with the dazzling feats of Zorro on TV, had found my rod and used this ‘sword’ with devilish skill on the roses. The rod was beyond repair, but even then I kept its shattered remains in the back of a wardrobe, ‘till a house move and common sense consigned it to a tip. But common sense or not, it was hard to throw it away. There were a lot of memories under the varnish. No amount of money could ever replace that rod.

My second old favourite was not my rod when I first saw it. I will explain.
Mark Kitteridge probably owns more rods than me, and possibly has done so since about birth. From the time we worked together at Just Fishin’ he regularly seemed to own more rods than the average tackle shop. So one Monday morning when he arrived for work after yet another fishing trip clutching one of his rods that needed a tip repair, I was surprised by his reaction. He was clearly very upset.

“It’s my favourite rod,” he explained. “Best rod I have ever owned, and I broke a couple of inches off the tip,” he wailed. Now that was some endorsement. All those rods, and this one got him that upset. After he repaired the tip I picked up the rod to see what all the fuss was about. The moment I picked it up, I knew. The rod instantly felt right. The balance was great, the tip section was – even in its shortened state – sensitive but not soft. There was power to burn in the butt section. The multi-taper of the rod meant it could truly fish a range of line weights, from 6 to 10 kilos. Better yet, it was just over eight feet long, my favourite length for a bait and jigging rod – a truly magic stick. I had to have one.

The distance between want and satisfaction is sometimes a very great. The greater the want the longer the road, and the more detours. The rod, a Daiwa Sealine Graphite, had been imported into the country two years before as a trial shipment of only a dozen or so. All had been sold, and worse, the rod was not being made (in Japan) any more. Mark had a couple of friends who owned the rods, but no amount of begging could persuade them to sell one to me. But relief was at hand. The sales manager of the importer of Daiwa discovered one of the rods in a shop down the line a-ways. In the flick of an Amex card I owned it.

Matched up with a Daiwa Sealine 20SL or 30SL reel, depending on line weight, this outfit became my favourite straylining, lure tossing, and jig fishing rig. It was, and still is, the best rod and reel combination I have ever fished with. For three years it was the first rod I grabbed for any saltwater fishing trip.

My darling boy, the fruit of my loins, “orrible Ed’, decided that he and some of his mates needed a spot of fishing. So off to Leigh Wharf they went, the gear for the trip, heavily loaded from my shelves with no permission sought or granted. They went, fished and set out for the return. Half an hour into the journey they realised they had left a rod behind: my rod, my precious rod. By the time they got back to the wharf the rod was gone.

I did not find out about the missing rod for some weeks. By then it was too late to be very angry, and it was way too late to get a replacement. Ed had tried that. Faxed messages had been sent to Japan and the USA, but the rods were simply unavailable.
To this day I have never found a rod and reel combination to match it – but I am still looking.

So once you have found a rod that fits as well as a pair of old black shorts, guard it with the utmost diligence. Hide it from your kids, protect it from your mates, and never, but never, lend it to anyone. There is way too much opportunity for grief on this addled planet to add the loss of a favourite rod to the list.

A Blast from the Past! This article originally appeared in NZ Fisherman magazine – March - 1998