Some vintage heavy terminal tackle

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Shellbelly
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Some vintage heavy terminal tackle

Post by Shellbelly »


My brother and I found one of our Grandfather's tackle boxes and 4 of these rigs were stowed inside. He lived in Houston in the mid 20's and caught the off shore bug. He and some friends targeted grouper out of Galveston. He gave up the off shore fishing and apparently sold most of his rods and all of his big reels. We keep finding odds and ends in wooden crates and boxes he kept in his garage. These are huge hooks. The small lengths of pipe are leaded. The other piece is a rather large gig that we believe he made. Most gigs have two prongs. The middle prong (as we were told) is intended to immobilize redfish by piercing the spine. Otherwise it's a flounder gig. We don't know how old this stuff is but we are in our 60's and have never seen these before. He never spoke of his off shore trips..in fact he didn't speak much at all about anything unless he was teaching us something.



Do any of you know what size and style of hooks these are and if the rigs are manufactured or probably hand made?
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kyreels
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Re: Some vintage heavy terminal tackle

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By sheer coincidence, I was just at a house a week ago where the previous owner had passed away and had a large amount of salt water tackle in a junky hoard. There was among those objects a large number of hooks of that size as well as that same chain rigging (all unused and shiny). I assume it may have been used for shark fishing, but don't really know. I can get a photo in the future, at the time I passed on it as being outside of my interests.
Matt Wickham
Collector of Casting Weights, KY Reels and KY Tackle
Shellbelly
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Re: Some vintage heavy terminal tackle

Post by Shellbelly »

Thanks, Matt! That at least tells me that the rigs are/were probably commercially made. I've been in many tackle shops along the coast and haven't seen these new or old. I'm going to mount these on driftwood and hang 'em high.
Shellbelly
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Re: Some vintage heavy terminal tackle

Post by Shellbelly »

An update...a friend has seen these and he was told they were used for alligator. I guess that's fishing. I wouldn't want to deal with one of those on (or off) a hook. I've never targeted reptiles but have brought in a few soft shell turtles. Very tasty.
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