When I was a kid I used to fish a lot with a cheap handline.
I’m sure you know the sort… Thirty feet or so of green seine line, a few feet of monofilament leader, a sinker and a couple of hooks on a wooden frame…
Sadly, they are something of a rarity these days and when you can find them they are no longer on wood frames. There’s something about plastic that just makes them so much less substantial.
Actually the whole green seine line might be something of a disappearing thing as well because doing a search for them on the web resulted in mostly monofilament-only handlines on yo-yos…
The reason I happen to favor the green line is more about that it’s easier to handle than monofilament line without gloves and having landed a twenty pound grouper as a kid on just such a handline I tremble to think what my hands would have looked like if I’d been using 20 test mono. That said, I’d be lying if I did not admit to the fact that the green line just looks right… Ya know?
I’m not really big on the whole yo-yo thing either. Mainly because they take up a lot of space and you can’t stick one inside a pocket or other small space. I always kept a handline under the seat of my bike because you never knew when you might pedal by an untried or inviting fishing spot with a little time to kill…
Since I have no shortage of small bits of wood and ply cluttering up the boat, I may just build myself a few “proper” handlines but more about that next post…