By Nuno Decosta
Somewhere along the line of four decades of fishing I became the Tacklepusher. I always loved to fish but I was most importantly falling in love with the tackle to get the job done. Tacklepusher is the in-house brand created for our tackle shop, Tyalure Tackle in Rye, New York.
Life as far as tackle was so simple 40 years ago. My introduction to fishing and tackle as a kid was a bamboo pole with monofilament, a bobber and a hook catching both trout in freshwater and snapper bluefish in saltwater. Fast forward some years later and I would be introduced to party boats fishing for bluefish and then tuna.
The only reels provided by the Klondike IX party boat in the mid-1990s were Penn Jigmasters or Daiwa 50Hs for inshore fishing and either Shimano or Penn 50 or 80 size reels for offshore. Superlines were in their infancy, so we would use 30- to 50-pound mono for inshore or 80- to 100-pound monofilament for offshore tied straight through to the hook, maybe adding a swivel for chunking.
While offshore jigging was effective, we only had the 50 wides as an option, with 8- to 16-ounce diamond jigs. It was exhausting to jig the night away with these outfits. The following decade brought on the advancement of braided lines and fluorocarbon leaders, and that pushed a wave of more compact powerful reels such as the American-made Accurate Boss and ATD models. All of that came with a learning curve, as the no-stretch lines would have to be tied using different connections than we used for mono, which led to failure and frustration.
