PETZL TIKKA HEAD TORCH
Price: £ 25

Head torches for anglers who night fish or just fish into darkness for an hour or two are a must. Unless, of course, you’re happy fiddling about with one hand while holding a conventional torch in the other. Or doing what I used to do years ago and hold a small torch with your teeth. And who would be happy with that given the choice? Not many, and especially once you’ve tried a head torch and know what a difference it makes.


Three LED’s
Head torches have come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years and this is down mainly to the introduction of LED torches that give massive savings in battery power and weight and don’t cast a penetrating beam into the water should you accidentally look that way.

This Tikka model from Petzl is a typical example and is an angler’s favourite. It weighs a mere 70g, including batteries (three AAA LR03 1.5 volt), and the light from the three LED’s is plenty bright enough for netting fish, baiting hooks and seeing as much as you want to see within a distance of about 10ft. If you want to light up the far bank of a fishery then forget it. But forget that anyway, it’s anti-social!


Three AAA 1.5V batteries
The elasticated headband can be adjusted to fit around your head or around your cap (with your head in it!) and the tiny on/off switch on the front part of the lamp is easy enough to operate. The light is tilted so that it shines at just the right angle at which you would bait a hook.

The claimed battery life is some 150 hours but that has to be weighed against the fact that the batteries slowly deteriorate to the point where you don’t realise it’s happening until you fit some new cells and immediately see the difference.

The bulbs (LED’s) are not replaceable but have a life span of several years.

Website: www.petzl.com

FISHINGmagic VERDICT

Light in weight, light enough to see most of what you want to see when night fishing, easy to fit to head or cap, and more than easy on batteries. A great headlamp for anglers, of that there is no doubt.

Room for improvement? There’s always room for improvement. The batteries reduce in power significantly in about 12 to 15 hours use, but the process is so slow you don’t notice the difference until you fit the torch with a new set. I tend to use my batteries for about 30 hours before changing them, which is a considerable difference in the 150 hours of life claimed by Petzl. However, 30 hours of good usage is still a hell of a lot compared to conventional torch life.

The on/off switch could be better; it’s very fiddly when your hands are cold and it doesn’t feel like it locks into place too well.

Although the angle of the beam is about right for most fishing applications ideally I would have liked this angle to be adjustable so that the ‘beam’ (more like the cloud of light that is cast) was also suitable for other uses, like walking off on a particularly black night. Yes, I know you can take another torch with you just for that purpose, but I’m continually striving to reduce the load I carry and I reckon one torch should be enough.

The Tikka, and its sister, the Zipka (retractable Dyneema cord), are still my favourite head torches though.

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