April Opportunities

from April 2023 etcetera magazine

Springtime in the garden

produced by CEKA, DEP, and SAP were almost identical and were aimed at the salmon fishing market. All the reels manufactured with worm drive had a triangular or hunchback shape in order to accommodate the small gear attached to the handle shaft that sat over a longitudinally mounted worm gear that drove the rotor.

April Can Often Mark The Start Of The Good Times Regarding Fishing In Our Region

By the end of the month most species will be in season although it is a good idea to check the regulations in the department where you intend to fish. Of late there have been several prefectural changes to the dates when zander can be fished for. The zander close season in three lakes in the Charente - Lavaud, Mas Chaban and Sérail - has been put back so that it closes a couple of months later than in the rivers and other lakes, the closure extending beyond when you can fish for zander elsewhere. There are also new areas of Mas Chaban that have been classified as réserves de pêche and as such are now out of bounds to anglers.

April also offers a brief period after the early spawning of roach and perch and before the carp, barbel and chub begin their reproduction. As the weather warms up all species will move towards shallower water from the depths where they spent winter. Carp will particularly be active and some good catches can be made this month. Later this month I will be travelling down to Spain to renew my acquaintance with some mullet.

The Worm That Turned

How many anglers consider what goes on inside their reels? Not many I would say. The mechanics of fishing reels has become increasingly complicated with bait runner, free spool, and variable oscillation in fixed spool or spinning reels, and some fixed spool and multiplier reels feature twospeed gearboxes. Then there are the complicated and ingenious anti-backlash brakes on bait casters to consider.

When what is now known as the fixed spool or spinning reel was invented by Illingworth, he had to overcome a 90degree change in direction in the same way that prop shafts turned axles via a differential in rear wheel-drive vehicles. Like now, early reels were made with two shafts, one being powered by the handle and the other being turned by the interaction of cogs or gears. You can see by the shape of the bodies of the early reels that there was a large crown gear attached to the handle shaft and a smaller pinion gear attached to the rotor shaft. The crown gears were often made from cast alloys of varying hardness and the smaller pinion gear that turned the rotor was often brass. These gears sat on steel shafts that were

By Clive Kenyon

set into bushes moulded in the cast alloy reel cases that invariably wore loose. In order to give sufficient oscillation for a wider spool, Mitchel reels were given eggshaped bodies rather than the conventional round shape that hugged the crown gear.

Before that, the English Hardy company had patented a different mechanism for powering fixed spool reels via a worm drive. The patent, taken out in the 1930s, was fiercely guarded by Hardy, preventing English manufacturers from bringing out their own versions. The Midland-based JW Young company did negotiate an arrangement with Hardy to use a worm gear to produce their Ambidex and Ducross reels. These differed from most in that the worm gear was made from Tufnol, a type of plastic.

On the continent however, worm drive reels were being developed in Italy, France, and Germany. Worm drive reels had a massive advantage and an equally massive disadvantage over the crown and pinion gear system. Firstly, the amount of contact between the worm gear and the pinion gear was greatly increased, entailing smoother operation and less wear and tear on the gears. The downside was that the cost of machining a brass helical drive was phenomenally expensive compared to stamping out gears made from alloy. The Italian Alcedo company, founded in 1945, brought out several variants of worm drive reels before the manufacturing process bankrupted the company around 30 years later. The German form of DAM produced worm drive reels including the DAM Quick range and achieved huge success. In France, worm drive reels were first introduced by MEPPS, a company founded by a former Peugeot engineer. The MEPPS Vamp was the first fixed spool reel to be made in France and was subsequently sold worldwide. In Cluses, the home of the company that eventually sold 10 million Mitchell reels with crown and pinion gearing, several smaller companies produced reels manufactured with worm drive gears from the 1940s. The reels

The company that enjoyed the most success with worm drive reels entered the fray around the mid-1960s. ABU of Sweden had become world famous for their high-quality multiplier reels and diversified into the ‘spinning reel’ (as they called them) market with their Cardinal range. ABU introduced a groundbreaking anti-reverse with their new range of reels. Instead of a steel pawl acting on a cast alloy gear that historically had led to many failures, the Cardinal’s anti-reverse locked the much harder teeth of the rotor pinion. Conventional reels typically had a gearing somewhere around 3:1 to 6:1 where one turn of the handle resulted in multiple turns of the rotor. When the anti-reverse pawl locked onto the drive gear, that gearing was reversed causing the undue force of the steel pawl on the more fragile alloy gear. Once a Cardinal was locked, it remained locked and there was no chance of a powerful fish stripping the gears. In the British carp fishing world, the ABU Cardinal was the game changer and was quickly adopted by most of the names of the day. ABU had the upper hand for twenty years until a Japanese company, Shimano, introduced the baitrunner reels that took carp anglers into a new dimension. Shimano knew all about gears having been involved in making bicycle transmissions for decades before the American Lew Childre asked them to make fishing reels for his company. Shimano Baitrunners were aimed specifically at the carp fishing market that was dominating British tackle sales. It allowed fish to take line in a controlled manner by use of a secondary drag system that could be engaged or disengaged quickly. This has been found to be useful in other types of fishing including big game angling for sailfish. The American company Penn introduced their Liveliner range of bait runners with a hardened CNC cut gearing to tackle these aquatic monsters. Most modern reels now use hypoid drive to transfer the direction 90 degrees. Hypoid drive differs from the conventional crown and pinion in that the gears are cut in a spiral bevel and are not straight cut like the old reel’s gears were. This type of gear increases surface contact and is used in heavy haulage trucks. Next time that you turn the handle on your silky smooth six-bearing example of the reel maker’s art just remember the engineers and designers who created it.