Deep in the furthest recesses of the fishing den there lay a small plastic box. It has been there for years and every now and then I opened it up either to add another item or wistfully shake my head at the waste of the contents. I kept promising myself that I would find the time and inclination to get around to sorting this mess out and this week I finally made the effort. I fished out the box and sorted though the contents – old spoons.

Mainly Toby’s, these were the lost souls of my tackle collection. The waifs and strays, the ugly ducklings if you will. I used to buy up old spoons whenever I saw them and along with the pristine gems there were the less fortunate ones. These had been left in the bottom of fishermens tackle boxes to go rusty, some looked like they had even been retrieved from the depths of a lake or river. Others had been used in salt water and never rinsed after use. In short, all of them were in extremely poor condition.

I removed all the rotten hooks, rings and swivels first. There were a couple of stick-on eyes to be scraped off too. Out came the fine sandpaper and they all were given a good rub down to remove any corrosion. Next, I cleaned them with warm soapy water and dried them off. Donning a pair of gloves I then cleaned them with nail polish remover to remove any traces of grease. To give me a good surface for the paint to adhere too I next gave them all a spray with some etch. Any that actually had a ‘good’ shiny side were only etched on the ‘bad’ side.

As a wee lad of 8 or 10 years old I used to love building model planes, you know, those ‘Airfix’ kits. Spitfires, Heinkels etc were carefully glued together and painted using those tiny tins of enamel paint sold under the trade name ‘Humbrol’. Hard as this is to believe, I still have a few of those old tins from my now very distant childhood and the paint inside is as good as ever! Once the etch had dried (it does not take very long at all) I got out the brushes and the wee tins and started painting. I didn’t have any red enamel (well, you didn’t see many red Spitfire’s did you?) so I had to use a water based acrylic instead. These ones will need to be epoxy coated. I’ll do another post on that process.

My idea was just to give these old spoons a basic new colour scheme, nothing fancy you understand, just solid colours on one or both sides. I am firmly of the opinion that salmon react to the movement of the spoon rather than the colour, so a lick of red/black/green/yellow paint is not going to make a huge difference as far as I can see. Some of them I painted all black on both sides just to see if they will work. I have read that in coloured water an all black lure or fly is the easiest for the fish to see. Beyond catching the occasional grilse on a Black Pennel fly in a filthy brown spate I have no proof of this particular theory.

I am a bit short of hooks right now so the final assembly will need to wait but that will only be the work of  few minutes to dress each of the spoons with new split rings, barrel swivels and strong trebles (Owners for preference).

In amongst the Tobys there was a HUGE handmade spoon which was chromed on one side. I decided to give the concave side a lick of fl. yellow paint and it came out lovely. I’ll definitely give this one a try for the green fellas when the winter comes around again. You can see from the photos below this is a gigantic spoon.

A couple of days ago I unearthed a wee bag with three completely bald Kynoch’s in it. Needless to say they got the same treatment and they are now painted silver.

The damned virus continues to take the lives of many good people and disrupt our daily routine for those of us who are spared. Messing about with some old lures and paints helps to occupy my mind during these dark days. I hope this post finds each and every one of you safe and well.

update, i found a few hooks so here is how some of Toby spoons turned out:

I especially like the look of the all black ones, I have high hopes for them but it will be next year before they get a swim by the looks of thongs.