There's something tempting about reels. More than any other fishing tackle, reels get my plastic friend twitching. At a trade presentation recently I listened with interest as a product designer explained how a design engineer approaches his job and how a machine shop approaches the same task. In there somewhere was the role of tradition: “I want a reel that looks like a reel.”

Many years ago I was handed a weird looking reel, an early cassette reel made by STH. This was back before arbours got large, when a normal fly fisher had two or three lines of a line-weight on spare spools. That STH reel sat on the shelf unsold for years, decades before its time.

Listening to that design engineer it seemed like design was all important, as if ‘invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ I’m not so convinced. Changing our expectations takes time and marketing work. Cassette fly reels and large arbour fly reels both arrived as oddities, interesting curiosities. Now they are normal.