Wildside - Outdoor Equipment Organisation

Getting your brain into gear

© Zane Mirfin, Wildside Column, Getting your Brain into Gear, Nelson Mail, 4 July 2009

Depressed because bad weather is keeping you from the outdoors? Cheer yourself up by making sure your hunting and fishing equipment is ready for action in the spring.


Happiness is . . . Me with a bunch of new fly-tying equipment.

❞ Some of my most prized outdoor equipment is gear I have either made myself, someone else has made for me, or other items that I’ve inherited along the way. I still use my late grandfather’s homemade, aluminium scoop net frame for whitebaiting. 

According to the Nelson Mail that night, it was the coldest recorded morning in Nelson for 16 years and so . . . the
perfect time to go floundering!

Naturally there was no-one else around and the channels of the Waimea Estuary were all mine.

As I set my net alone on the calm waters, I pondered the homemade netsetting frame I had made two winters
previously out of 4x2 timber off-cuts.

Screwed together with coach screws and with a piece of old carpet stapled on
to stop the net getting sucked up into the outboard motor propeller, it has caught my family many flounder
dinners since.

Costing virtually nothing to make,my homemade frame has had a few minor modifications along the way, but these have just improved its efficiency whenever I find time to get out on the water.

Making outdoor equipment yourself has a lot of benefits. You can tailor it to your own requirements and it will generally cost far less and give you more satisfaction that any commercially available product.

Some of my most prized outdoor equipment is gear I have either made myself, someone else has made for me, or other items that I’ve inherited along the way. I still use my late grandfather’s homemade, aluminium scoop net frame for whitebaiting. My grandfather, Ken Hill, put a lot of thought into the design, but the thing I like best is the history and the family connection to idyllic boyhood days spent on the riverbank with Ken and my grandmother, Pat.

This winter I’ve been busy again, building, designing and repairing gear for hunting and fishing trips. Recently,
I built a foam-padded gun rack out of 4x2 boards for sighting in my rifles at the rifle range. Designed to be used on a concrete bench-rest shooting platform, my rack will hold my rifles absolutely steady so they can be the most accurate
I can make them on the range. Attention to detail will always bring home the bacon.

Other recent projects include using surplus timber to build drying racks inside my garage so when I arrive home
wet at night, I can dry waders, raincoats and other outdoor equipment before another early start the next day. I’ve also installed rod racks on the ceiling and have been building storage systems to hold all my net ropes, weights and floats.

Recycling plastic electrical cable reelsto hold different length ropes, and colour-coding the reels by wiring on plastic milk bottle tops, costs nothing, but will make it so much easier later on when, in the dark, I’m in a race against the tide.

Most of these jobs only take time and add greatly to efficiency and enjoyment on the water in those warmer summer
months.

Winter is a great time to complete such projects and while maintenance is a boring topic, keen outdoor folk will appreciate the need to look after their valued sporting equipment.

My outside shed has now been customised with LED lights run off a motorbike battery and interior shelving to store gear out of the weather and, most importantly, to have equipment readily accessible and organised for when I need it.

In the process of getting organised, I’ve realised that recessions are actually good for us because they force us to use
the resources we have available and to appreciate what we have now. A customer once told me that a person is wealthy if they can’t name everything they own and that probably includes pretty much all of us.

In getting organised, I’ve found tools, materials, resources and other gear that I had forgotten I owned and by putting it all together where it can be easily located I’m back in control again. After months of spring-autumn outdoor activity, gear had been thrown into sheds, and was in desperate need of a clean, a wash, some repair or just love and attention in the form of a lube, new line, or a new part.

I’ve started writing jobs to do on my garage whiteboard before I run out of winter, including splicing ropes, repairing nets, oiling a rifle stock, making new whitebaiting screens, replacing braid on saltwater reels, untangling decoy rigging systems, patching waders, repairing multiple pairs of wading boots, re-tying new setline traces, sharpening knives,
cleaning out the bait freezer, making sinkers and jig, tying flies for the upcoming fishing guiding season and more.

Every keen outdoor person will have their own to-do list. Mostly it is a lot of fun and you’ll learn new skills along the
way. 

Maintenance can cost money, but it is definitely cheaper, easier and safer than having to replace equipment at short notice because your outdoor gear wasn’t given some TLC when it desperately needed it.

Winter is also a good time to get your outboard motor serviced.

While you’re working on throwing out junk, stacking shelves and repairing outdoor gear, you’ll also get some great brain waves on improvements you can make to existing systems.

If you want to continue to be successful you need to be thinking about how to customise gear and tackle to get the best results with the least hassle when you’re outdoors.

It can take years to perfect your gear organisation, transport and operational usage, but you can learn a lot by talking with other hunters and anglers and by checking out their kit and systems.

Being invited into the man-cave of noted angler and guide Peter Church of Turangi last winter to check out his fishing gear and boating systems was a revelation. It is amazing what you can learn in a few hours that you can then adapt to your own situation.

Half the fun of fishing and hunting is thinking about it,and preparing so you can be ready to go whenever the opportunity arises.

After all, when spring rolls around there will be deer to shoot and fish to catch.

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