John Bailey – The Kingfisher Diaries
October 10th 2009
Hardy Prowla Comes to Town
We were privileged to host Andy Charlton from Hardy Greys down Kingfisher this last week. Andy is one of the stalwarts up in Alnwick and comes out with some great ideas on tackle. He's a great guy and it was very good indeed to see him down here with the latest range of Greys Prowla predatory kit.
I must admit it all looks good. A fantastic range of rods and accessories. The rods are all light, responsive and fun to fish with - even the heavier live and dead bait tools. The lure range is really seriously worth checking out.
Andy has also devised all the accessories any pike angler is ever likely to want. One of the purposes of his visit was to check and recheck everything does its job with utter precision. It was actually good to see such methodical field testing take place. I personally was really impressed with the obvious quality of everything in the Prowla range. I'm personally particularly obsessive over traces. If the wire, the hooks and the tying doesn't look exactly right, I'll resist the temptation to buy and make things up myself. The Prowla traces, however, looked absolutely spot-on. In the end, it's the traces that are always going to let you down on a big fish. The idea of leaving a leviathan with hooks in is just too horrible to contemplate, so I applaud Andy on the levels of quality that he has set.
Sods law. Kingfisher was at its most sullen when it came to piking and apart from a jack or two, nothing much came out way. Good job we'd had a great days perching the day before. Again, we had miserable luck with three big stripys coming adrift through no fault of our own. We managed one fish, a scraper too but it was in fantastic condition and really raised out spirits.
We've got a commitment from Andy to come back in the winter to try and sort the big pike out down here. I think it's generally realised that when it comes to pike, Norfolk has the edge on Northumberland!