LATEST ADDITIONS

With autumn and winter fast approaching the season is coming into my favourite time of year for carp fishing. It’s a great time to be on the bank, with a lot of waters seeing angling pressure drop as the fair weather anglers come off venues. It is the ideal opportunity to get winter campaigns well underway. My main approach has and predominantly is bollie fishing wherever I can.

This style of rod holdall is becoming more and more in vogue, and for good reason. Being able to store multiple rods inside one sleeve, all together, but with good all-round protection is the holy grail when it comes to rod bags, and these tick all of those boxes. Old-fashioned rod holdalls are exactly that, old fashioned, but many anglers don’t like the alternative quiver-style bags because rod protection isn’t at its best. The triple sleeve, in Aqua’s case called the Tristar, isn’t a compromise between the two; it takes the best features of each and combines them.

You could easily be mistaken when searching for rods that they are all built with casting in mind, but what’s one of the most enjoyable parts of carp fishing? Yes, that’s right, the playing of the carp; the battle you waited so long to enjoy. Avid believes in the feel, action and sensation of the fight and that’s why the new rod range encompasses a smooth, bendy parabolic action with hand-picked cosmetics for a true first-class finish. Each of the four models feature Non-Lock carbon materials boasting a super-slim diameter. As you would expect, each comes fitted with high-end Fuji reel seats and Japanese shrink-wrap handle seamlessly finished with lightweight SiC guides along the rod.

The old Tournament reels went down in the annals of carp fishing history as absolute classics and you’ll still see plenty of old-school anglers using them. They were built to last and I once described them as the Land Rover Defender of reels. They weren’t without their issues, but one or two of them, including the squeaky retrieve, almost added to their charm. More recently Daiwa upgraded the classic Tournament, with improvements internally and with some material upgrades.