Fishing: Every rod has a story to tell

I collect old troutfishing rods. When I'm too old and feeble to catch trout, drink booze and have sex, I'll restore them as a hobby in front of the TV while watching teams like the Hurricanes beat the Crusaders.

Some old rods carry an aura of remote places and big catches. You know the instant you pick one up, see the wear and tear and feel the perfect balance and latent power that it has caught a tonne of fish in its lifetime.

An old Taupo harling rod from the 1950s, the fibreglass scarred and pitted, the rings worn by constant action, was handed down to me by a family with the comment, "dad got 90 with that one in an afternoon".

Pride of place in my old-rod collection goes to two 12ft greenhearts with brass ferrules and reel fittings, the maker's inscriptions long gone but believed to have been made by House of Hardy in Alnwick, Northumberland, in the 1880s.

Greenheart, a tough, elastic hardwood from the West Indies, was the dominant material used by rod-makers until 1900, when the superior split-cane rod developed by Hardys took over. In New Zealand, greenhearts were still available in tackle shops in the 1930s. Hardys made their last one in 1952.

Greenheart rods had a full-flexing, lazy, slow-swaying action. They varied from 8ft for fly rods to 22ft for salmon rods. My two were handed down to me by the family of the late Charles Marshall of Southland, whose farm at Otatara bordered the wild tidal reaches of the Oreti River, home of magnificent silver sea-run brown trout where I spent many happy hours as a boy.

The greenhearts, because of their length, could be reached out over the exposed riverside weedbanks at low tide when you could walk for kilometres trolling live bait such as smelt and cockabullies, caught in a scrim net dragged across the weeds (you got plenty of whitebait in the net too, but threw them away because they were so plentiful).

Today's anglers favour the popular fishing zones and the back country and generally bypass a river's tidal reaches and estuaries, which harbour a variety of food accounting for the fine condition of the fish, particularly in spring and early summer when schools of smelt, mullet and whitebait are on the move. Modern lightweight, rods and superlines make fishing for sea-run browns much easier today, the angler able to cover much more water.

Those old greenhearts certainly have stories to tell. Mr Marshall carried in his wallet a clipping from the Southland Times reporting how he caught "one 16-pounder, two 14-pounders, an 11-pounder and a nine-pounder" in three hours.

On another occasion he had, on his farmhouse table, a 20-pounder which he was trying to pack into a banana crate to send to an Invercargill orphanage. He had to extend the length of the crate to accommodate it. I saw another 20-pounder caught by the same technique using a live bully on a greenheart rod at Waituna Lagoon on the southern Southland coast.

Mr Marshall could spin yarns - all with a perfectly straight face - that would keep a kid like me transfixed for hours, like the monster eel - "lyin' there like a man sunbathing" - basking on weeds at a little lake and wildlife refuge bordering his property. The word spread and men came with spears, which the monster snapped off like matchsticks; then someone got it with a pitchfork, which the eel wrenched from its attacker's hands with a mighty writhe and swam off, last seen circling out in the lake, its passage marked by the pitchfork sticking up out of the water.

There's no harm in stretching a fish story.