In Praise of Brollies and Guyropes

Last year I bought a Korum 50" brolly which when faced with anything stronger than a light breeze would turn itself inside out and bent the centre pole, therefore it became an expensive sun shade - so didn't see much use and got stuck in a corner after being used twice!

Now after several months of not going fishing for one reason and another I decided a visit to the local club water was in order and, as the weather has been so miserable was faced with the old conundrum - chance it and just get wet, or try and make the brolly work!

So a quick visit to Halfords and £7.99 later I got 3 x 5m bright orange guyropes, line adjusters, and 8 x 10" tent pegs.

Today went fishing and attached one of the guyropes to the top of the brolly, used the tent pegs (rather than the shorter Korum ones) to peg the thing down at the back and using the guyropes to run down the front pegged them down out of the way of me, my tackle, and out of tripping over range - and HEY PRESTO the useless piece of junk I had bought before was turned into a superb weapon against the elements withstanding gusts up to 20mph (according to the met office) and not a leak in sight! I was bone dry and didn't have to worry about the damn brolly - Fantastic, and even landed a couple of nice carp!

Why don't brolly manufacturers supply them with guy ropes, adjusters, and decent sized pegs - it would only cost a few more pennies and make a mediocre product brilliant!

Because it would cost a few more pennies...

Brolly inadequacies

The design of the basic brolly strikes me as inherently poor. Its effectively a small parachute pinned down at a solitary point.

Heres a challenge and an idea for the tackle manufacturers out there. Its an idea I've already suggested to several manufacturers and if I had the capital I would finance it myself.

A basic pram hood style design that attaches to a chair or seat box. I don't think for a minute that this would be difficult to design and aside from the problem of the chair being blown over when the angler gets up (which shouldn't be too hard to address) I think it is an obvious solution!

I have a Korum brolly and peg the fabric of the brolly to the ground, as it's designed to be, and add my own guy ropes, 2 forward & 1 back; I don't use the facility to reposition the centre pole as I feel in the normal position it helps to stop the brolly blowing forward. This arrangement seems to stand up to a fair amount of wind but doesn't seem anywhere as secure as some of the brolly systems carp anglers use.
I think the next logical improvement would be to buy some storm poles, which I think can be added just by using as few attachments to the brolly stays
The only downside to this is that you cant situp so straight for fishing the pole or hittting fast bites on the waggler- it's more for reclined fishing but sometimes staying dry comes first!