Telling Stories by Savs

I was driving into the setting sun in an unfamiliar city and the steady stream of incoming messages to my phone was playing havoc with my ability to follow the GPS. “Yi-sus” said my colleague in the passenger seat in his Bloemfontein accent so thick that it sounds like a parody of the real thing, “someone love you stukkend today neh?”

We pulled into the car park and I checked the messages. Kehla, in Canada, was messaging me to tell me that he’d found me a rare Hardy Neroda ‘Kenya’ fly box that he thought, in an uncharacteristic display of sentimentality that left me slightly wary, would be perfect for me. It was apparently mislabeled on eBay and had gone unnoticed by the usual horde of punters. The reserve was low and the auction closed in a few hours. An easy peasy score, to paraphrase him somewhat.

“I’m on my way to entertain clients over dinner”, I shot back, “I don’t have the time for this” and I muted my phone.

Let’s just make one thing clear, I’m not above throwing a week or two’s wages at an item that catches my eye and I have a drawer full of mostly expensive, but altogether useless, knickknacks as evidence of this. With my phone vibrating incessantly in my pocket and my curiosity piqued I excused myself after a socially appropriate period and nipped into a toilet stall to check it. Between anguished appeals for my immediate and undivided attention was a description of a similar item from the original catalogue and an excerpt from a magazine article on the boxes.

The short and somewhat generalised version of their history is that Hardy made, or should I say commissioned, the boxes directly from Bakelite to replace their tin boxes as they had issues with the durability of the Japanned finish. The early boxes, of which is was one, are some of the first items to made from what was in its time a revolutionary product.

Hardy would receive the moulded boxes from Bakelite’s subsidiary, Redmanol Ltd, and would then send them out to Wheatley to have clips or fuse wires fitted. Available in oxblood or tortoiseshell colours they are items of great beauty and utility.

I sent the eBay link to The Supermodel, asked him to bid on my behalf, resolved to ignore my phone for the remainder of the evening, designated my colleague as driver on the trip home and went back to a decent red, a fantastic steak and engaging company.

Now it’s worth mentioning in the context of this piece that the collector is a strange subset of the angling fraternity. They tend to shun anything that is new or represents any level of technical advancement in materials or design. That they cling to the habits of yore is I suppose much how you can describe practically any marginally odd peccadillo; an aesthetic choice. Like any other subset they have developed their own code and language and in their instance the black modified rubber side plates of a reel somehow become known as ‘ebonite’ and arguments over the winding check on a split bamboo rod can rage for days with combatants, without a shred of conscience, sharing compromising personal information about their opponents mothers. For the most part though, old tackle is just old tackle. The reason that it sat in the rafters of your wife’s uncle’s neighbour's garage for all that time is that it wasn’t terribly good to start off with and it got set aside never again to see the light of day until you found it. This of course isn’t going to stop anyone from believing that they’ve lucked into the means to a comfortable retirement, or at least an extended vacation somewhere tropical, when they lay their hands on a bit of misshapen Tonkin. At least weekly you’ll see a “what is this worth?” post on social media.

Granted, there are some fantastically valuable items lying in an attic somewhere. Just don’t get all pissy when you’re told that the rod that grandfather fished the Mooi with in the forties is worthless and is a wall-hanger. Its sentimental value is enormous and if nothing else it reminds us of a more gentle time when things were crafted slowly and meticulously by hand.

Despite all of this we’ve almost all dabbled at some time in a misguided attempt at collecting. Doc owns a forest of older plastic and grass rods and has some wonderful reels to go with them. By modern standards they mostly have the sort of build quality and fishability that place them squarely in the realm of ‘old crap’ - but they’re cool and I envy his collection. Still, this sort of mindset

The Supermodel is something of a collector. Let’s just say that when something catches his attention he really, really commits. But the bug is passing through his system and he’s busy offloading some moderately interesting and other quite noteworthy items. That he’s taking a hiding on them is something that I should have empathy for. But I don’t. I’ve done rather well out of his follies and have landed a few bargains.

The Sensei is typically pragmatic to a fault. When he adds a rod to his arsenal he rids himself of another. It’s an approach that manifests in his reel selection where he uses only three reels, all of the same model. When he finds a better reel all three go at once. Look, it’s not exciting, but he carries half the gear that I do and always knows where to find it. I’d tell you that he’s missing something important but I’m speaking existentially - he never misses anything of real importance.

When he called me up to say that he’s looking for a good bamboo rod I was caught off guard. We did finally narrow it down though to a Western American style rod in the eight foot range and with hollowed sections. It’s proving to be difficult to find but he’s already bought a reel and a line for it so he’s clearly resolute.

However, and here’s the funny thing about the rabbit warren of vintage or collectible tackle, when last I saw him I left him with a six foot Farlows “The Elf” two-piece made by Sharpes of Aberdeen that came up for a pittance on a used tackle page. He was still wiggling it appreciatively when I looked at him through my rearview mirror. It’s a nice pole. The corks are good, the blank immaculate, the whipping is ok and the ferrule is tighter that the Scotsman that planed it.

It’s not a bad buy at only three figures, South African. That it’s two feet shorter than he wanted, English and reasonably hefty reflects the danger of looking into this stuff - the more you see the more you like. I doubt that he’ll wake up one morning with a dozen unused vintage cane rods propped up in the corner of his bedroom, but I’ve seen it before.

As for the market on antique fly boxes, it’s anyone’s guess. I ended up paying a fair amount more for the Neroda than it was listed at. You see, while I was the only person on the planet trying to buy it I was not the only person bidding on it.

The Supermodel followed my instruction and while I was sipping wine over dinner he was engaged in a furious bidding war with “some guy in Canada”. They fought each other, each on my behalf, in one dollar increments right up to the closing hammer. In retrospect perhaps I might have foreseen this eventuality, but it makes for a good story.

As it turns out I secured a rare bargain in the world of vintage or collectible tackle. My box, a waistcoat model with foam rubber inserts never featured in their catalogue and is, although I’m open to correction here, the only one in existence. It might not exactly be the Penny Black of fly boxes, but it’s probably not far off. I’ve been offered enough for it to cover a tropical vacation somewhere, but only for a week and provided that I don’t order from the cocktail menu.

That the box is still being held in the arthritic death-grip of Kehla somewhere in the Great White North is something that I really should have anticipated. Collectors, , hoarders and doomsday preppers alike don’t give up the goods without a fight.

Like a scene out of The Lord of the Rings he knows that he has to one day let go of it and, to extend the analogy, it seems I might need to go round his place and bite his hand off to get custody of it.

As for the offers of purchase that I’ve received for it - they’ll need to bite my hand off before they get my precious.