ARTHUR’S ARCHIVES Drennan’s first floats
Tackle giant Drennan had the humblest of beginnings, with a kitchen table acting as the company’s first factory floor...
“Peter Drennan can genuinely be described as a great angler”
WALK into virtually any fishing tackle shop in the UK and you’ll see a display of Drennan tackle.
The scope of the ranges is breathtaking, from simple packs of float caps to top-end poles costing close to £3,000. It’s difficult to imagine that this all started with a young Peter Drennan making specialist floats on his mum’s kitchen table!
Back when Peter started in the early 1960s, floats designed for specific tasks such as fishing fast-flowing rivers or delicately presenting baits on ponds and gravel pits were not commercially available. There were cork-bodied cane river floats, and what we now call grayling floats or perch bobbers and, apart from porcupine quills, that was about it.
What Peter did was solve problems for, originally, himself and his angling companions – and they were no mean bunch either, including the likes of the Taylor Brothers and Richard Walker. Today there are a staggering 63 floats in the range, covering every type of freshwater fishing apart from pike angling… which is catered for by a different arm of the Drennan tackle empire!
Now consider hooks, line, a definitive range of swimfeeders, brilliant catapults, rods, reels – just about everything a match or pleasure angler needs. Predator, specimen and carp anglers are well catered for by their own specific Drennan brands.
As well as being a genius at tackle design and innovation, Peter Drennan can genuinely be described as a great angler. You can’t design floats as different and specialised as his without a profound knowledge of how best to make end tackle behave.
I feel blessed to have known Peter as a friend for 50 years and he is still as excited today at the prospect of his tackle helping anglers turn their dreams into reality as he was when whittling bits of balsa and cane in his mum’s kitchen nearly 60 years ago.