Spousal Disinformation

“My only worry when I die is that my wife will sell my fishing tackle for what I told her I paid for it.”

That saying is supposed to be a joke, but you’d be surprised at the number of blokes who get a chilly shiver down their spine when they hear it.

I’m one of them. I’ve been forced into this state of spousal disinformation by the insistence of SWMBO that for every dollar I spend on fishing gear, she gets to spend the equivalent on useless girly stuff like shoes and handbags and coffee with the girls.

She’s not an easy one to fool, my wife. I once tried to disguise a mission to buy a boat as a shopping trip to buy my son a birthday present.

With the deal done I went home, leaving the boat at the dealers for a few items to be tidied up.

The instant I walked in, she said “you’ve bought a bloody boat haven’t you.”

(Howinthehell did she know that? I’ve still never worked it out.)

Imagine cheating on this woman – by the time you got home from your lover’s tryst she’d be standing at the front gate with your favourite filleting knife and a pair of testicle clamps at the ready.

There are always ways of disguising fishing tackle purchases, of course and some of them have even been known to work.

Pretending that the gear has been borrowed from a mate is an excellent excuse, although this introduces a level of uncertainty to the equation. As in “when does Kerren want that rod thingy back, won’t he want to use it?” This sort of question is designed to severely test your abilities in the area of spousal disinformation.

Take for example, my mate who arrived home with a spanking new Shimano T-curve Bent Butt game rod, a steal at something over $300. The unfortunate thing about all this is that he chose to do so on his wife’s birthday. The same birthday that he had forgotten to buy her a present.

He managed a partial recovery by using the old “This? It’s borrowed from a mate” story but it still wasn‘t enough to prevent a lengthy stay in hospital.

That excuse one has worked for me as recently as three weeks ago when SWMBO sprang me with a new soft plastics reel.

Another mate has enough gamefishing lures to fill several rooms of his house. He is what’s known as a hopelessly addicted “tackle ho.” Every new lure or new skirt combination he sees, he must have (even though he can only run 5 or 6 behind his boat at a time).

He was doing OK until one day he accidentally left a price tag on one of the lures.

Guess who said “these things don’t cost you twenty bucks each do they, you conniving old bastard?”

He is expected to make a full recovery in time for game season, however his credit card is still on life support following three weeks holiday for his dearly beloved in Venice.

One of the best ways, if you can manage it, is to sneak the gear onto the boat and get it messy before she sees it.

Women may be able to spot the difference between a pair of Jimmy Choo or Prada shoes at 1000 yards, but they have no idea of the difference between a Penn Slammer eggbeater or an 80 wide game reel. We can use this in our favour – get some old bait smeared onto it and you can claim “this old thing, sheesh, had it for years.”

When I decided to get into gamefishing, I knew there would be a substantial investment needed in equipment. Over the winter period I slowly ticked off the items on the must-have gear list, carefully hiding each item in the office stationery cupboard at work.

It just meant that the staff had to be extra careful when getting the paper clips, lest they be crowned by a razor sharp marlin gaff made of three-quarter inch thick stainless, about 6 ft long. Fortunately there was no need to involve the OSH people.

The opportunity to repatriate all the gear to home came when SWMBO left for a month in Canada and I wasn’t in any way put off by her departing comment, as she looked towards the rod rack in the garage that “there had better not be any more rods in there when I get back.”

There weren’t. They were still stashed up the back of the garage under some old sacks when she got home, but soon enough I had to spool them up – which I did using a full gamefishing gimbal belt to hold the rod and reel. When her fun-radar alerted her to the fact that something was up and she walked into the garage while I cranked the nylon onto the sparkling new gold Penn International, I knew I was screwed.

“What’s that?”

What’s what?”

“That big-ass golden reel.”

“What big-ass golden reel?”

Her eyes narrowed as she prepared to strike ... she tried to visualize what that gold might look like melted down into rings and topped with large diamonds.

“You’re a cheeky chap,” she said, spinning on her heel and heading straight for the credit card. It was always going to get messy, that one.


So yes, if anything untoward does happen to me, will someone please sit my wife down and tell her:-

I really do have five game rods, not three. They are all mine.

The recently acquired Penn Torque 300 reel is not a prototype sales sample that they’re not allowed to sell. It’s the real thing.

The sweet little Daiwa Black Widow II soft plastic overhead reel in the top drawer of the filing cabinet is not borrowed from Graeme.

In the front of the boat is a huge tackle box chocka with Gulp, Sluggo and Catch soft plastic baits. If you turn it over there are dozen new blade jigs. These were not bought at the warehouse for $5 each, most came from WS Lauries and were three times that price, at least.

There is another whole bag of gamefishing lures under the satchel in the garage storage cupboard, and no, they don’t cost twenty bucks each. The reason I bought that new storage bag at the boat show was to fit more new ones in, not because the zip broke on the old bag.

And don’t any of you send her this article.