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Undergunned?

True, Graham,

.........and he's had some large ones on 'em, though nothing approaching 18+lbs, but doubles all the same and he uses 'pins with them too. I've watched the through actions of these canes and been amazed at the pressure that can be applied when you have faith in your line & knots.... as well as the rod!!

Mike
 
Nice of you to give me the credit Mike but it's the contributors who make the forum. It is a change from the old what landing net handle though.
 
Adrian Williams said:
Nice of you to give me the credit Mike but it's the contributors who make the forum. It is a change from the old what landing net handle though.
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I agree with you to a point on the 'what handle' point Adrian, but that and the first sentence in your post above (and the old friends back slapping fest that preceded that post :D) has prompted me to ask a question. Are you REALLY, hand on heart, now claiming that your original post was honestly intended as a serious question?

Hand on heart now Adrian :D

Cheers, Dave.
 
Yes it was Dave! Ade bought the Wizard some time ago, no let me rephrase that, considering the money that changed hands Ade pinched the Wizard some time back and has been umming and ahhing about using it ever since.
 
Kevin Daly said:
Yes it was Dave! Ade bought the Wizard some time ago, no let me rephrase that, considering the money that changed hands Ade pinched the Wizard some time back and has been umming and ahhing about using it ever since.
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Ah...well I never did!. Thanks for that then Kevin. I would have sworn on oath that Ade was on a bit of a wind up, starting up his own slightly more sophisticated version of a 'what net handle' type thread for a laugh :D I don't know Ade personally, but over the years of reading his posts on this and other forums, he just doesn't strike me as a man who would seriously ask a question like that on an open forum. Shows what I know :p

Cheers, Dave.
 
ok guys my apologies as i misunderstood the well meaning behind the posts as it looked a little like it was heading toward some of the wrong threads that use to crop up sometimes.
a little of my world 50 odd years ago, living in a quaint eastend village of Hoxton market i was spoilt for good tackle shops and rod builders ect,
dons of edmonton, sowerbutts,ashpoles,jw martins place just off upper st.and lots more,a funny little tackleshop called Vics in essex rd.where you just never knew who was going to be in there yakking,sloshing the cups aqnd smoking between helping youngsters like myself and guiding us wisely, hell one old geezer once told me to take a gallon of maggots to kings weir and use the biggest dropper i could come up with and stick at least a 1/3rd of down as a carpet, run my big old porcupine quill a couple of feet or so overdepth and lay on over the carpet of bait all this withing 8 ft of the bank by the corner of the weir, i wouldnt be surprised to find him fishing there still after all these years, in those days i was using a stepped up hollow built tench rod around 12ft ! yeah guys used to look in horror at me using that and casting to the middle of the runoff where it started to shelve up, stopped a lot of fish with that rod, heavy thing and the top 2ft bent and with a little twist but the long rod helped me hold bottom where 10 footers failed
.whats this got to do with the thread? not much but it does, Kevin i just assumed the wizard was similar to several other avon type rods like the avocet or others similar yes with hindsight maybee 1lb 6 oz may have been nearer the mark (remember i am clocking on a bit now and writing notes wasnt in my list to do and now the memorys not great for detail lol)
Ade i know you will realise i had not meant anything personal with personal choice of tackle, yes i love that feeling of trembling uncertainty when a cane rods hooped over and you can feel the corks trying to move and flashes of thoughts such as is the bloody blank going to open up, or other thoughts which most cane rod users have racing through their minds at times,
todays purpose build carbon rods are wonderful tools and the more refined ones moreso, i will always be of a mind that its easier on the barbel if the fight is over as speedily as possible and this doesnt mean using ungiving rods massively over strong but yes strong enough, i am still in love with my ipower rods and i dont suppose i will ever need to buy another barbel rod , in fact i would relish the idea of outwearing my fishing rods:D but doubt it:eek:
well whos got some more flashbacks :)
 
A lot of sentiment over sensibility I think, however just as I admire those old British motor bikes they really are not a scratch on modern machines for performance or reliability, and yet there are always those amongst us who will deny progress and hang on to the past with the thought that things were somehow better 'back then'. But of course things were not better and indeed were a lot harder, it's just that we are older and looking back to our younger days of course we are to think things were better, that's what old folk do.:rolleyes:

Fishing rod technology has come a long way, light blanks that are immensly strong and cheap in comparison to the old days, and the reels!!! so smooth now and again cheap, so perhaps before we all fall into the sentimental twaddle pit, how many of us would actually swap our carbon rods for cane to use or our Shimano Bait Runners with super smooth drag, and all the other bells and whistles, for some old 'coffee grinder' fixed spool, or a wooden reel?
Thought not :)
 
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River Levels

Just checked out the levels on the EA site for the Midland region, don't think I will bother venturing out to-day :mad:
 
Neil Smart said:
A lot of sentiment over sensibility I think, however just as I admire those old British motor bikes they really are not a scratch on modern machines for performance or reliability, and yet there are always those amongst us who will deny progress and hang on to the past with the thought that things were somehow better 'back then'. But of course things were not better and indeed were a lot harder, it's just that we are older and looking back to our younger days of course we are to think things were better, that's what old folk do.:rolleyes:

Fishing rod technology has come a long way, light blanks that are immensly strong and cheap in comparison to the old days, and the reels!!! so smooth now and again cheap, so perhaps before we all fall into the sentimental twaddle pit, how many of us would actually swap our carbon rods for cane to use or our Shimano Bait Runners with super smooth drag, and all the other bells and whistles, for some old 'coffee grinder' fixed spool, or a wooden reel?
Thought not :)
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You thought wrong!
Neil if you limit your fishing to banging out a feeder the size of a small road tanker or something similar then you may have a point. If you feel the need to explore the far bank of the lower stretches of the Trent Thames or Severn then I cannot argue with you. I do actually fish like this, usually on Norfolk beaches or somewhere similar.
One of my life’s great joys is trotting a stick float I am not pretending I have anything like the skill at it as some others who post on here but I can when the weather gods are kind to me make a decent fist of it. With the exception of the hand made uber expensive fashionable pins show me a reel that betters my 4 3/4 inch Stanton for trotting. Still made, though not by Harry Reynolds in his backyard in Ilkeston, and about £350 a pop now
I have had that since I started work as an apprentice in 1969 I bought it for 22 shillings and sixpence from a bloke called Alf Kitchen who bought it direct from Harry. Apparently Harry sold them around the pubs and clubs in South Yorkshire but that was before my time. Alf had upgraded to one with handles as he had a bit of arthritis. It’s as treasured as my 1962 Triton and Liz my missus. I used to use it on a Sowerbuts 14ft Spanish Reed with built cane tip that sadly I no longer have. My first wife who is not treasured one bit either burned it or gave it away. The reel is a joy to use, I have referbed the bearings but everything else is original. It is a joy to use and it still does get used. The rod however weighed a ton by comparison to my Normark 14 footer and did belong in a glass case. that cannot be said of most of my cane rods, the ones I fish with work well and still do the job they were intended for. I suppose I must be a bit of a crackpot, I don’t have a telly, I repair stuff, how odd is that in this throw away world. Neil if having garish chromed reels and lots of bling appeals to you and you are happy using it, fine, I am chuffed to bits you are getting what you want out of our pastime. Why am I so wrong for getting what I want?

PS Shimmys are so last year. Penn Slammer Live Liners are the new black mate
 
Kevin Daly said:
You thought wrong!
Neil if you limit your fishing to banging out a feeder the size of a small road tanker or something similar then you may have a point. If you feel the need to explore the far bank of the lower stretches of the Trent Thames or Severn then I cannot argue with you. I do actually fish like this, usually on Norfolk beaches or somewhere similar.
One of my life’s great joys is trotting a stick float I am not pretending I have anything like the skill at it as some others who post on here but I can when the weather gods are kind to me make a decent fist of it. With the exception of the hand made uber expensive fashionable pins show me a reel that betters my 4 3/4 inch Stanton for trotting. Still made, though not by Harry Reynolds in his backyard in Ilkeston, and about £350 a pop now
I have had that since I started work as an apprentice in 1969 I bought it for 22 shillings and sixpence from a bloke called Alf Kitchen who bought it direct from Harry. Apparently Harry sold them around the pubs and clubs in South Yorkshire but that was before my time. Alf had upgraded to one with handles as he had a bit of arthritis. It’s as treasured as my 1962 Triton and Liz my missus. I used to use it on a Sowerbuts 14ft Spanish Reed with built cane tip that sadly I no longer have. My first wife who is not treasured one bit either burned it or gave it away. The reel is a joy to use, I have referbed the bearings but everything else is original. It is a joy to use and it still does get used. The rod however weighed a ton by comparison to my Normark 14 footer and did belong in a glass case. that cannot be said of most of my cane rods, the ones I fish with work well and still do the job they were intended for. I suppose I must be a bit of a crackpot, I don’t have a telly, I repair stuff, how odd is that in this throw away world. Neil if having garish chromed reels and lots of bling appeals to you and you are happy using it, fine, I am chuffed to bits you are getting what you want out of our pastime. Why am I so wrong for getting what I want?

PS Shimmys are so last year. Penn Slammer Live Liners are the new black mate
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Hi Ken
Thanks for the reply and it was entertainment reading what you have a passion about, just wish you lived next door to me, sure we would get on just fine.

Never really been a tackle tart as such, and as a boy when money was really tight I had to make my own rods, from solid fibre glass, and those horrible Mitchell Princess reels or similar attached, but I seemed to do all right with catching the odd big roach in the days when there were some Roach in our rivers. I loved then float fishing and to this day it still is my favourite method, but to be liberated with a light 14' rod is a real joy compared with those heavy things of my child hood.

I dislike using heavy gear, but as I live by the Lower Severn, I have to at times, needs must I suppose.

Bling? Can't really avoid it I suppose, I agree all that chrome!!! I have a unused Stradic, using it would surely mean some wit would surely question my sexuality :eek: so I agree 100%.

But some of this new stuff is pretty good you know, it's all right Kevin you can use it, not as if you are selling your soul to the Devil, besides look at all that time you will have on your hands not tinkering with stuck ferrules and fiddly bale arm springs, why you would have some time to put your feet up and watch that new fangled telly thing:p
 
Neil, I happen to know exactly what happened to Kev's last telly, it weren't pretty but it did get a message across....... I wish I had his bottle and passion.
I also wish I had his Triton and the other magnificent lump he has parked in his garage. And he's right about his Mrs too, she really is a treasure.


Dave, I really was in a quandary when I started this thread but I'm confident now that the super will be up to the job and I'm looking forward to a chance to put it to the test.
I have had loads of barbel up to low doubles on my other standard Wizard so I don't really know why I was feeling a bit pensive about using this one. Cautiousness comes with age perhaps but I'm going to throw caution to the wind now and go for it. The only concession I will make is to use a barbless hook; that way if I do get straight rodded by something unstoppable and broken off at least the fish will be able to loose the hook quick enough.
 
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Ade. No not them new fangled barbless hooks! Spawn of the Devil they is.

Neil, I do have lots of new tackle, to be absolutely honest most of it very good but some of it is by Fox! I have to admit I am a tackle tart and I own far too much of it. Also I find it difficult to sell anything at all, If its rubbish I don’t like the idea of palming it off, if its good why sell it? Mortgage is history and, apart from the bikes and the ones I share with the missus I am allowed very few vices, so why not a new rod or four when I fancy one. As I said most of it is very good but that dictates that some of it is not.
Rods, Albert has his Free Spirits, John his Bob Gill jobs. I love Dave Lumbs rods and for fresh water I have promised myself I will now buy no others. Can I interest you in 4 Free Spirit 3lb 9ft Piketamers. Great boat rods, but not for me, far too tippy. Never mind I have two grandsons.
Reels, I laughed out loud about your comment about the Stradic. I have a pair; used once at night, when I came back from having a pee they scared me. They’re in the attic now. Never mind I have two grandsons.
I have more recently got into lure fishing, you want to see some of the monstrosities in my lure box, they look like something from Ann Summers. Never mind I have two grandsons who are far too young to understand that sort of thing. I still catch on old Jim Vincent spoons my dad gave me when I was a kid. I don’t use them much, do a search on ebay and you will find out why. Mercifully they were at my mums when I got divorced. Cane spinning rods, there is something I don’t get dewy eyed about for some reason.
50 years ago there was some good gear being made, and a lot of old tosh. Nowadays there is some good gear being made, and a lot of old tosh. Actually you know nothing changes much.
 
Adrian Williams said:
Dave, I really was in a quandary when I started this thread but I'm confident now that the super will be up to the job and I'm looking forward to a chance to put it to the test.
I have had loads of barbel up to low doubles on my other standard Wizard so I don't really know why I was feeling a bit pensive about using this one. Cautiousness comes with age perhaps but I'm going to throw caution to the wind now and go for it. The only concession I will make is to use a barbless hook; that way if I do get straight rodded by something unstoppable and broken off at least the fish will be able to loose the hook quick enough.
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Hi Ade, I absolutely understand. Age has made me a total ditherer, I need to be certain everything possible is in place, signed, sealed, delivered and ready to go before I can contemplate making a cup of tea, let alone owt else (Ask Conrad...I think I drove him mad :D) Oddly, I don't stop to think that others may get a bit like that at times as well :D

Go with the barbless hooks Ade. I think Kevin is just being a rascal with that last comment...not that I am telling you anything you don't know :p

Incidentally, I Googled 'Wallis Super Wizard' rods, and found a page giving a potted history of Wallis Wizards in general. The writer came out with the fact that these rods were made for many years, and that surprisingly, they varied a lot during that time in all details, including action and tapers...which I find odd. He also mentioned that he thought the 'Super' with the all agate rings were too heavy, that he re-rung the ones he owned with standard st/st rings. I would imagine doing that would do their value no good at all :eek:

Best of luck with the rod, I am sure it will cope admirably. I do understand the love of old things...some of my underpants are probably worth a fortune on Ebay :D

Cheers, Dave.
 
An interesting thread is this. Firstly let me say that all things that are handmade have so much history and engineering evolution embedded in them that they should be cherished and admired. I find it satisfying that the likes of Kevin Daly take the time to not only cherish these items but do so in the most practical way, and that is to actually go out and catch large fish with them. I therefore am aware that a fishing rod can be much more than just another pierce of tackle, and that for many these items have a real soul and what follows is not meant to relate directly to cane rods.

The thread started from the premise that the angler might be “outgunned†by a large Barbel if the rod he were using was not man enough for the job. There are references to the test curves which needs to be 1.75lbs or thereabouts and the fact that the rod needs plenty of backbone if one is to steer fish away from snags and to get them to the net without an overly prolonged fight which might result in it being returned in an exhausted state. Other attributes of the rod were that it needs to be able to cast a decent weight when feeder fishing in powerful flows.

The feature of the rod that in my experience seems to differ from the received wisdom above is when it comes to situations where it is required to apply maximum pressure on the fish. It seems generally accepted that in these situations something with a stiff lower 2/3rds that enables the angler to really pull back is what is required and that a rod of much lower test curve with a soft action that easily bends all the way through to the reel seat is not the correct tool at all. My experience has shown me that the opposite is true. Take a hypothetical situation where there is no rod at all and the line is wrapped around my gloved hand. In this situation I am able to apply so much pressure on the fish by pulling directly on it that if not careful I would break the line even if I were using 30lb braid. Now let’s do the same when using a powerful 12’ rod with the top 1/3 hooped over so that the effective lever on the angler is 8’ long. Can I pull as hard as I did with the line wrapped around a glove…no I cannot because of the leverage and I would find it impossible to snap 30lb braid. Therefore the softer the rod and the more it bends, thus reducing the lever length against the angler, then the harder you can pull a fish away from a snag. I do not have any experience with cane rods in this situation to know if the rod would explode or not. However I do have experience with modern carbon rods in this situation and it is absolutely amazing what you can do to them without them breaking.

The example I will give is a session on the Wye where I was not fishing but acting as general guide and helper to my friend Martin. I knew of some deep water down the edge of a pool that held good fish because of the mother and father of a snag that was present in the form of a dead tree that was lodged there from previous floods. The snag was easy to map with a Smartcast to see the extent of it as the branches of the tree showed up really well. Under normal circumstances, as I’m not a great lover of skull dragging, I would bait up upstream and give the fish time to find it and start to feed confidently knowing that I had a bit of river to play with before the grating started. On this occasion time was against us so it was decided to fish much closer to the snag and hang on for grim death. Martin amazed me by taking out a Drennan 12’ 6†Tench float rod and setting it up with 30lb braid with a short 15lb mono leader. He explained that he had done this on many occasions without the rod breaking and that he could yank just about any fish out of anywhere with it. I have to be honest and say I was more than a little sceptical but it was no more than 20 minutes before I saw a rod bend more than any rod I have ever seen…I simply would not have thought it possible for a rod to hoop over that much without giving way. The end result in less than 2 minutes was 10lb 5oz Barbel which is a cracker for the Wye in my book, and as far as I’m concerned a lesson learnt. Please do not accuse me of advising everyone to go out and by a float for Barbel fishing in snag situations, but I am asking you to consider strong soft rods to apply maximum pressure to a fish.
 
Richard,

Does that mean that in theory the exact opposite situation would be true - soft tip and a faster action would be more suitable for lighter hooklengths, or where hookpulls are a possibility (not talking barbel here)? I.e. the soft tip absorbs lunges and shocks while the stiffer action lower down helps prevent the angler applying excessive force?
 
David Gauntlett said:
Hi Ade, I absolutely understand. Age has made me a total ditherer, I need to be certain everything possible is in place, signed, sealed, delivered and ready to go before I can contemplate making a cup of tea, let alone owt else (Ask Conrad...I think I drove him mad :D) Oddly, I don't stop to think that others may get a bit like that at times as well :D

Go with the barbless hooks Ade. I think Kevin is just being a rascal with that last comment...not that I am telling you anything you don't know :p

Incidentally, I Googled 'Wallis Super Wizard' rods, and found a page giving a potted history of Wallis Wizards in general. The writer came out with the fact that these rods were made for many years, and that surprisingly, they varied a lot during that time in all details, including action and tapers...which I find odd. He also mentioned that he thought the 'Super' with the all agate rings were too heavy, that he re-rung the ones he owned with standard st/st rings. I would imagine doing that would do their value no good at all :eek:

Best of luck with the rod, I am sure it will cope admirably. I do understand the love of old things...some of my underpants are probably worth a fortune on Ebay :D

Cheers, Dave.
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Dave you got the wrong site mate. FKW Wallis was I think the first ever sponsored angler. He was sponsored by Hardy not Allcocks. I own a Hardy's "Wallis Wizard" one of the rods in my tackle room that is awaiting refurbishment and as it is a very pants rod by any standard it will probably be waiting for refurbishment when I am mingling with The Thurne! Allcocks did make a rod they called a Wallis Wizard but Hardy’s hit them with the threat of court action and they dropped the Wallis bit rapid. To my fairly certain knowledge no Allcocks Wallis Supper Wizard was ever built.
PS Allcocks rods were not that valuable in their day and I can never understand why anyone would pay over a ton for one so ringing it to suit you self is nothing unusual.
 
Darren George said:
Richard,

Does that mean that in theory the exact opposite situation would be true - soft tip and a faster action would be more suitable for lighter hooklengths, or where hookpulls are a possibility (not talking barbel here)? I.e. the soft tip absorbs lunges and shocks while the stiffer action lower down helps prevent the angler applying excessive force?
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Darren,

Good point, I had not really thought about turning my experience on its head as it were but what you have said makes sense to me,
 
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