Equipment advice

[king01]

hi all, i am looking for some advice. after a good fishing umbrella and also a good set of digital scales.

dont wanna pay silly money as i am new to this and need to covince the missus its all necessary...

should i be going down the argos route at my level or buying better..

[Maddison_Twatter]

Originally Posted by king01

hi all, i am looking for some advice. after a good fishing umbrella and also a good set of digital scales.

dont wanna pay silly money as i am new to this and need to covince the missus its all necessary...

should i be going down the argos route at my level or buying better..

If you buy argos you will only replace it within months, try ebay or local ads ect for second hand branded gear, daiwa do good gear at fair prices. Im sure someone on here could sort you out with a link to what your after .... que Nick R

[Bluesbro]

Look at Glasgow Angling or Veals websites mate, i picked up a ron thompson beach shelter for £50 and its lasted over 2 yrs with no problems

Joe

[northern eye]

There are some great bits of gear available at the local tackle shops at a reasonable price and you wont need to line Argos's already bulging pockets.

I picked up a Ron Thompson Warlord rod for £40 and it has 3 different quiver tips and a normal section which handles all aspects of ledgering or feeder fishing effortlessly. The new Drennan reels are superb for the price (£30 for the float type and £35 for feeder type). Also found that the Leeda Carp Match range of rods are great for the price. I have the 13 ft waggler version and its a good rod. My mate has the feeder version and this is also a good rod.

I have tried the cheaper rods and reels (Argos/Boyes etc) and there is no point in spending your cash on em when you can get good gear by spending just a touch more.

Also, my advice would be to stay away from the cheaper range of Shakespeare rods. Although a reputable make at the high end, some of there cheap rods are very poor and likely to snap on you. (Sorry Shakespeare but I have witnessed it).

Hope this helps - Go to your local tackle shop though, they will be able to give you good advise on the rod and reel combo and you can actually pick em up and hold em rather than look in the pages of a catalogue and then find you av purchased a load of tat!

[peakoverload]

Over the years I've gone through quite a few umbrellas but by far the best I've owned is my current one which is a Daiwa Mission Overnighter brolly which is excellent. It comes with two long storm poles and pegs but If it's not too windy I prefer to use much shorter storm poles (which you'll have to buy separately although you could get away with strong bank sticks) and have these attached at sides. This means that the front is totally open giving you more room to move around. You also have the option of buying the brolly wrap which turns it into a 1 man bivvy. I haven't got this as I don't need it but the brolly and wrap works out less than even the cheapest bivvy.

As for scales, the problem with cheap scales is accuracy and a cheap digital scale is no more accurate than a cheap spring balance. I recently was looking for a set of digital scales to replace my old and inaccurate spring scales and found found the Berkley Tec Digital Scales which for me are ideal. The version I bought weighs up to 35lb (I seriously doubt I'll ever catch anything even close to 30lb let alone over it) and is accurate to 1/10th of 1% i.e. it's very accurate. You can buy other digital scales that cope with heavier weights like 100lb but generally these are far less accurate unless you spend a lot of money on them like the Fox ones. The Berkley scale cost me £34 which I think is excellent value for money.

The only criticism of the scale I have is that it has the ability to save weights and the way it does it is confusing and in all honesty I don't think I've really understood it. It works something like this: It automatically saves every weight until the memory is full (think it stores something like 10). Then once it's full it can then choose to erase some or all stored weights or you can choose to overwrite an existing weight with the new one if the new one is heavier which you do by choosing which bank to save it in.......or something like that. The manual reads like a bad translation into English and really doesn't make it sound very clear. Personally this is not an issue for me as I really just want to know what a fish weighs and am not that interested in storing it for any length of time.

HTH