High Sticking – How Fishing Rods Get Accidentally Broken

It can be a very depressing end to a fishing trip when you arrive back at your car and are just about to head home and accidentally shut your best pride and joy fishing rod in your car door. In all my years of fishing, I have only ever broken one rod and that is how it happened. However, as the father of three boys, they have managed to snap several more by swishing them around inside the house. High Sticking is one “accident” you can easily avoid. 

 

Rods also get broken when you overload your car without first placing them in crush-proof PVC tubes.

I remember many years ago surfcasting on the West Coast with a group of anglers. We all decided to load our gear into the vehicles and head a few kms further down the beach. There were a dozen of us altogether. We just crabbed our gear as quickly as possible and loaded up for the short journey to what we hoped would be a better spot further along the beach.

 

One of the members of our party insisted on completely dissaembling his rod, placing each section carefully into a cloth bag, and then sliding the cloth bag into his PVC tube while the rest of use waited impatiently. Looking back I can see he wasn’t silly at all. I bet none of his rods ever got broken.

1. High Sticking sounds right. I’ve seen that happen a couple of times to people.

2. A big rod killer is shutting it in your car door in the dark or chopping the tip off when you wind the window up. I’m guilty of that one.

3. A fly rod smasher is the old poorly cast hare and copper bomb scoring a direct hit.

4. And, funny when it happens to someone else is your surfcasting rod reverting to a two piece mid-cast as the top section of your three piece rod gets cast out as well as your sinker and hooks. With a bit of luck you can wind the tip section back in.

Kilwell don’t just sell fishing rods, they make them, including the blanks, in their Rotorua factory.