TACKLE GUIDE
Tony Grigorjevs is blown away by the quality of Daiwa’s new Matchman poles – which won’t, however, break the bank!
HOW WE TEST OUR GEAR
Our team of tackle experts use their years of angling experience to test new gear to its limits.
IT ’S FAIR to say that competition among the biggest manufacturers in angling is pretty robust.
They’re all looking for ways to gain an edge over their rivals. That’s good news for us.
First, the quality of tackle is constantly improving – the technology used to create rods, poles, reels and just about every other essential item you can think of is improved upon, year after year.
Incredibly, though, prices remain reasonably stable. Going back a decade, a rod costing £30-£40 would hardly have set the world alight. But nowadays, all the big manufacturers produce rods in that price bracket, and they are so good that even some sponsored anglers are choosing to use them.
The same can, within reason, be said of poles. Something costing £400 back in the day would have included a basic spares package of two or three top kits along with the pole itself. But as soon as one manufacturer sets the tone, the rest are often forced to follow in the same direction, or risk losing loyal customers.
Daiwa has helped set this trend, its Matchman range being the perfect example of kit that does a sterling job without breaking the bank. I’ve sampled a couple of the rods over the last couple of years and I couldn’t have been more impressed.
But enough about those, because the Matchman range just got even bigger with the launch of several new poles under the same banner.
Once again, the focus is on keeping prices low while providing something with more than a smidgen of ‘wow factor’. The range consists of 7m and 9m margin poles, as well as 13m and 14.5m power poles, and it was the latter that I decided to have a dabble with.
Staffordshire’s Pipehill Fisheries was my destination for the session, and I’d earmarked a particular peg on Alder Pool to see if the pole’s dazzling first impressions could be backed up by a performance to match.
Sharp frosts had hit the area in the days leading up to the tackle test but, while I knew that the carp wouldn’t exactly be willing feeders, I figured that they’d be reasonably easy to locate.
The swim at the bottom end of the peninsula is always a banker, with a decaying bed of lilies 13m down the left-hand margin and the island in front providing plenty of cover.
Carp in the 2lb-5lb bracket were the main target. They aren’t the biggest of adversaries, but I kne
