The fessor

Pretty sure they were made by Snyder . A few guys I knew back in the 1990s extended their MT8144 rods with 4 ft butt extensions to mount big Alvey 651A5 and C5 and 700A5 reels on. These rods were ugly but great for lobbing 4oz and 6oz snapper leads. One of them was extended as retrofit , he continued using his 700A5 reel on it , looked ugly and his casting technique was like with an overhead, looked awkward but he sure could get the distance . Two of the guys I knew upped the anti and build MT9144 rods with 4 ft butt extensions , one of these guys used a big SeaMartin eggbeater (was ugly but great reel). I had a go at casting it one morning (was thinking of buying a MT9144 and 4 ft butt extension to build up a home made rod for use with my Alvey 651C5 reels but it was like casting with a telegraph pole and a lot heavier than my FSU7165 so I abandoned the idea. My 651C5 reels are my favourates, literally indestructible and only needs wash down after a fish , and replacement of the ratchet (triangle clicker) and the antireverse after a while. I've used A5s but don't like having by thumb pounded when the fish is running, hence the C5s I use for the big fish. If you want a light reel , an Alvey yellow spooled 651C5 is not for you.

Wasn't the standard in spools of mono = 100m , 200m , 300m , 600m and 1000m Been a long time since I bought new mono for any of my reels.

I knew what you meant anyway , wasn't Snyder a fibre glass rod blank maker …. think nearly all my MT , SU and FSU rods were that brand .( now (?) Snyder Glas )

Snyder was good mono - knew a lot of old hands who fished for jewfish and snapper from the rocks who swore by it.

I've never used anything other than mono . There is good quality mono and rubbish cheap mono. The cheap stuff stretches like buggery and is very soft surfaced (horrible if there are rocks around). My choice for mono is Torque Green or Maxima .

Yep , I've been to known to add what ever was in my stomach to the burley trail.... and even when I get back onto solid land and lay down , it seems like the world is still rocking for quite a while. One of the reason why I've never owned a boat. I'm fine in lakes and rivers, but out on the sea , if the fish aren't biting , I'm spewing. Hear there are effective pills around , and some use gadgets now (but that sounds like hokaspokis to me).

That shows the closures started mid Oct 2017 , about bloody time this practice was brought to an end in Port Hunter. I hope that closure include lobster traps too. I know the Pilots were pissed with the gill netters because they had some instances where they collected the nets on their props and rudders on the way in and out of the harbor, especially when rounding the end of Nobbys wall to head south , and when they rounded the corner near lighthouse. I know this because I had a run in with some of these guys when I reported them to the fisheries. I stopped fishing Nobbys because I was fed up with loosing fish (snapper, trevally, kings and jewfish) to these nets when they swum into them , and I was fed up with loosing terminal gear nearly every time I cast out at the Sharkhole (a place I never had this issue before some fool at Fisheries granted these guys a license to net the wall. Been 3 summers I've not gone to Nobbys to fish because of this , and it was a bone of discontent for over 10 years , none of the regular jewie fishermen and snapper fishermen were happy and quite a few gave up fishing Nobbys too , and these guys were sneeky, they'd set the nets on dusk or after. (For obvious reasons , not least the fact they were using gill nets that were set , in breech of their license ). You can accept that or not , I don't give a toss.

There is a lot of rock and reef along that wall so how do they lay nets along it, especially with running tides? <<< I've watched them do this , they simply drift out along the wall with the current after dropping the end of the net with some kind of anchor at the up current end, then they are back next day and reverse the process by hand hauling the net into the boat . I don't think I have ever seen a profession cray fisherman lay traps inside a river to catch crays. I have seen plenty of recs try it though. Do you really think it is a viable cray fishery inside a river for a commercial cray fisherman to waste his time doing and does a cray licence even allow for them to fish inside the river. I have also done a bit of cray trapping over the years as a rec angler and the amount of fish ever caught in a trap is extremely minimal. Certainly can not ever wipe out fish stocks with them. <<< irrespective of your armchair objections , they do , at least they do here along Nobbys and Stockton walls and they do take lobsters and fish from the traps , I've seen them do so over many years .

You've obviously never been parked on Nobby's or Stockton B/Ws in March and April , when the trawler fleet leaves it's continuous stream of trawlers for 3 hours , then there are the beach haulers who literally wipe out entire sections of Stockton Beach and take entire schools of tailor, mullet, trevally etc, add the dregs to these = the guys who use the run out to lay gill nets along virtually the entire length of Nobby's from Horseshoe to the very end of the wall and who take everything , and the guys who put down "cray traps" that take more fish than crayfish along both sides of both Nobbys and Stockton walls. I expect similar pro fishing blitzkriegs happen at Bundaberg to Tweed and Morton Bay, Port Phillip & Western Port Bays, St Vincent & Spencer Gulfs, Pt Kembla, Sydney, Hawksburry River / Broken Bay, Swan River and Freemantle Hbr, Darwin. If there's a big population near a port , the pros have Xmas, NY, AusDay and Easter to make the cream of their living and they literally wipe out the fish stocks each year on November/December and March/April to meet demand from the public. The pros used to do the same in Lake Macquarie until they were banned from fishing professionally in the lake. Not sure about the situation in Port Stephens , don't often wonder up there hardly ever fish there since the beaches and 4x4 trails into the ocean rocks were closed access to vehicles. Most the fish sold in the shops and the Coop are thawed and has been frozen and on ice for weeks.

Been my experience over many years that it's pointless wetting a line over easter, the pros hit the reefs , rivers, lakes and beaches like a blitzkrieg in the 3 to 4 weeks before easter and it all goes on ice to be sold for top $ in the week before and over easter. Only fish left are the dregs and maybe a few that come in from areas the pros are prohibited from fishing. Plus I don't like fishing when there lot's of tourists and holidayers overrunning the local spots , 90% of them can't caste straight and it's not worth the agro IMO. Plus - traffic , just traffic. I'd rather stock up on fish , prawns, squid, crabs 1 to 2 months out from eastern and keep them in the freezer. So we simply stay home , and got the 8 yr grandkid and his dad here over easter, thawed some fish from my stash in the big freezer and OD'ed on chocolate eggs . Best way of spending easter is staying put, having family come to you bringing yummy chocs , and mostly just doing as little as humanly possible when not playing board games with grandson. IMO travelling anywhere over easter is for mugs. Those who wet a line over easter, even travelled to do so, hope you found some take to east fish.

My parents were the first in the street to buy a colour TV and a video recorder ( A Sanyo Betamax ). Very few of my mates even had TVs when I was a little kid. We were the only ones in the street who had a phone in the house right up into the early 70s , the nearest pay phone was about 1/4 mile away ( was 6p per call ) . We had only 2 TV channels , ABC & NBN , and sometimes if the atmospherics were right we sometimes managed to get 10 , 7 from Sydney and 8 from Tamworth. If we wanted to see a movie on 10 or 7 we had to go to a mates place ( near the top of Woodstock Street or on other (south) side of the street, some had very tall tv masts and boosters and picked up the two Sydney networks), Friday night and Saturday night and early morning SciFis and horror movies were an excuse for sleep over. I remember feeling ripped off when we changed from pounds shillings and pence to dollars and cents , suddenly my pocket money didn't buy as much.

That's a serious bit of kit. Looking forward to seeing how it's developed and the end product and reading how it performs . Not that I've ever fished anywhere requiring an electrically driven retrieve but I'm interested in seeing how you solve the engineering and materials challenges of getting to robust and durable and effective reel.

Being the season of fish ( on the table for many of us ). Thought would be fun for us to recall stories about the first fish we each caught and some childhood fishing memories - I'm sure we all have these.. My story . Way back in the early and mid 1960s people could hire motorized displacement boats on the Hunter River at Hexham. My first memory of a being taken fish was going so an afternoon's fishing with my dad and by BB in what was called a "put put" (this the sound the little (2 stroke ?) inboard motor on these timber displacement boats made as they cruised along about walking speed).I was handed a cork handline with a bit of peeled prawn on a hook and small ball sinker which my dad caste for me and then told me to sit quietly and hold the line between my two fingers and let him know if I felt anything - a tall order for little boy about 7 or 8 years old.Within a few minutes I told dad I had something pulling at the line and was told not to be so silly. But I insisted and dad checked telling me "it's just a snag" …. I didn't know what a snag was and insisted and proceeded to pull in the line and to my excitement discovered I had a big fish on the end of the (l was told it was a nice whiting) and was asked if I wanted to keep it or throw it back . Silly question. I insisted on keeping it and remember eating it and really enjoying it when mum battered it and fried it - much better than fishfingers (as a kid I thought they really were fishs' fingers and yep I though spaghetti in the can was worms in a can LOL).From that day on I was hooked and was soon going fishing down along the river bank at Hexham and on Ash Island , riding there with my mates on a pushbikes , and digging bloodworms and catching yabbies' and soldier crabs for bait and often catching garfish using tiny hooks baited with bits of wet bread, and using oyster bottles with doe in the end to catch poddy mullet (to sell live for pocket money). Lot of fish taken from the old Ash Is bridge - is still there and people still can be seen fishing from it occasionally , but it's been decades since I fished it myself , though I do still cross it to go and collect weed for luderick fishing from the "pond" . Plenty of fish taken on the opposite bank to the Sth Arm of the Hunter River to the Steelworks ( nice sandy banks there and places where there used to be mangroves (there's a coal loader there now). Mum and dad always knew I'd be gone on the pushbike about 4am every Saturday and Sunday , and most days during school holidays, .and I'd either be on Stockton BW ( I'd be waiting for the first vehicular ferry of the day to arrive and was always allowed to take my pushbike across for free - no Stockton Bridge then) , I used to fish The Wreck for tailor, bream, flathead, trevally and yellowtail , and being very a enterprising kid I'd keep some yellow tail alive to sell for 1 bob each to the jewie fishermen ( no such thing as battery powered live bait aerators in those days ) , who would use them to even catch jewfish during the day , and back then used either big alveys or Ajax centrepins and big Styrofoam floats. I learnt a lot by watching these jewfish specialists and was soon chasing jewfish too once I built my first Rangoon rod and after I was given my granddad's Surfmaster overhead reel (I still have this reel and still use it occasionally) , til then I was using a kiddie's baketite alvey til I upgraded to a Michelle 306 eggbeater (I still have and use it).. It was then that I saw the biggest jewfish I'll ever see landed off the end of Stockton Wall by a guy using an Ajax reel and Rangoon cane rod , over 6 ft long and tipped the scales at the fisherman's (trawler) wharf at 98 pounds and was taken during a fresh when the Hunter was in flood in daylight hours (and he had quite a crowd of people watching and created a huge sensation locally (writeups in paper etc)). I remember my granddads and dad telling me about jewfish up over 100 pound being taken in the 20s , 30s and 40s using setlines rigged up with cow bells to indicate something was hooked (usually a monster ray, or a huge eel , or a shark was what was caught this way) , the set lines were baited before dark and the swarms of Hexham Grey mozzies showed up, and they'd be checked if the bell was heard or next day. I think monster 90 pound or bigger jewfish are gone for good (at least here around Newcastle (Gosford to Taree) . Biggest I've seen since it were 73 pound (me on Nobbys) , 76 pound (me at Carrington Dykes) and one I took fishing from the Sharkhole (Nobbys) while fishing for snapper from the rocks during the day, a few in the same size bracket taken by fishing pals on Nobbys over the years , and by Joe and the other Stockton BW guys , and my biggest at 86 pound (me on Nobbys) and longer than me (that I landed fishing the Flatrock on Nobby's Wall). It took me over 20 yrs to crack it with a jewfish over 50 pounds with a jewfish weighing in at 73 pound that I had to land by myself at Flatrock in the wee small hours one night in 1990 ( I had to keep in the bathtub with 4 bags of ice til the next day before I cleaned and slabbed it up for freezing ) , my little boy woke up not long after I got home and came running into our bedroom in terror - he though a monster had come up the plug hole and was going to eat him ( memories like that are priceless). Or I'd be fishing somewhere near the Pilots Station (at the old timber tug wharves, or on the rocks at Horse Shoe Beach (back then the beach was maybe 100m South of where is now and it was deep water off the end of what was a small breakwall (and a great place to catch tailor and small jewfish), or along wharf road (was very close to the harbor shore there) , and I've be home after dark with a bag full of fish ( tailor, flathead, bream, soapys, trevally and garfish were usually in the bag and all taken on very simple cork handlines and plastic casting handspool , even coke bottles made it into my kit (the glass ones were perfect for hand lines), Thems were the days …

Hell, most us mere mortals count ourselves lucky if we hook and land ONE 10 kg or bigger snapper in our lifetimes. The biggest snapper I've seen landed was taken near Merewether from the rocks near the ocean baths , near 30 pound , was a monster. One my old fishing pals (German Joe) helped land a monster snapper near there that was close to 35 pound , caught by a little kid . That would have been a fish to behold and I bet the kid's dad was stoked when Joe called him to tell him to come get his kid and his monster fish ( beginners' luck , bet that kid never gave up fishing after than ).