Ellis Whiteaker, 11, had no idea what he might find when he went hunting in his basement in Fayetteville, North Carolina. ) and knew that his grandfather, a former Air Force pilot who died before Ellis was born, had left some very old things in boxes.

What he found were six antique rods – one with a handle carved into the shape of a baseball bat. He researched it and a similar model on eBay was selling for around $ 700.

“It was really beautiful,” Ellis mother Sarah Whiteaker said. And, of course, the value of the article “made him feel excited”.

Vintage fishing gear belongs to a category of collectibles sometimes referred to as “mantic,” which includes hunting accessories like antique guns and duck lures. But unlike vintage cars, for example, which cannot be hidden for decades in the basement of one’s home, vintage fishing lures and reels can be stowed away and rise in value for years without knowing it. of their owners.

John Stephenson, a buyer at UK fishing auction house Thomas Turner, said he gets 10 to 20 phone calls a day from people inquiring about the items they found. Of these, he believes, one in 10 has some value. Once a month, someone brings their auction house something worth five figures. “There are a lot more people looking for them now than 50 years ago,” he said of fishing antiques.

Over the past few hundred years, there have been endless variations in fishing gear – rods, reels, flies, and lures – providing fertile ground for collectors, who thrive on subtle distinctions and scarcity.

“The period from the 1850s to the 1950s was the Golden Hundred Years, when after that point fishing gear became virtually all mass-produced, and it lost its artisanal appeal,” said Jim Schottenham, l Lang’s Auction appraiser, specializing in fishing equipment.

In an effort to uncover some of these forgotten gems, Lang’s Auction worked with Fishbrain, the app for avid anglers, to encourage people to go scavenger hunts in their own homes, using a catalog-style listing. ‘rare objects as inspiration. (It was this move that prompted Ellis to ransack his basement.)

An item on Lang’s wishlist is an 1876 reel and fishing rod set encrusted with gold and topaz; if found, it should sell for over $ 100,000.

According to Mr. Schottenham, the market for fishing antiques accelerated in the late 1970s. In 1985, the New York Times reported that an antique reel had been sold for $ 5,000 at auction. In the 1990s, the market grew further as buyers and sellers began to go online. Today, fishing auction houses do a lot of advertising, enticing people who aren’t necessarily fishermen to sift through their attics and basements.

One of the holy grails for collectors is the Giant Haskell Minnow, a large hammered copper lure with a flexible tail that wiggles in the water. Patented in 1859 by an Ohio craftsman named Riley Haskell, the lure was “a true masterpiece of craftsmanship,” according to fishing antique dealer Fred Kretchman.

Only a handful of Haskell Minnows giants have ever been located; in 2003, Lang’s auctioned one off for $ 101,200, setting a record for vintage fishing gear at the time. The amount shocked collectors and sellers, and brought new buzz to the market.

“Someone said to me, ‘50,000 or something is a lot of money for a Haskell, ‘Mr Stephenson recalls (referring to the sales figure in pounds sterling). “I said, ‘Well that’s bigger than a diamond.'”

Today, people are often shocked by the value of the items they find. In a 2018 article for the American Museum of Fly Fishing, Mr. Kretchman described a customer who brought in an old rod that her husband’s father had received as a gift from a craftsman. When he told her it was worth $ 8,000, “you could have knocked it over with a feather,” he wrote in the article. “She was speechless.”

Nick Lyons, the fly fishing author and publisher, believes the attractiveness of collectors is tied to romantic myths of who American pioneers are, citing Huckleberry Finn and Daniel Boone. Fishing has one of the deepest literary repositories of any sport: tens of thousands of books have been written on the subject, dating back to at least 1496, when an English prioress named Dame Juliana Berners wrote an overview educational entitled “A treatise on fysshynge with an angle.”

And rare fishing texts are as collectable as fishing gear. Lang’s list includes the “Preston Jennings Book of Trout Flies”, written in 1935, which sold at auction for $ 94,400 in 2007.

But even more appealing to collectors than a literary pedigree is the nostalgia factor of a fishing tackle. “I don’t know of any adult male or female fishing who doesn’t want the rest of their family fishing,” Lyons said. “There is affection; the great mystery of what is underwater. Many people grew up spending afternoons on the water with their parents or grandparents. Decades later, those memories hold a powerful hold.

At this point, Ellis Whiteaker didn’t end up selling the precious cane he found. “For him, it’s worth a million dollars; he will never get rid of it, ”said Whiteaker. “It’s his connection to my father, whom he never met.”

As for the other ancient stems, Ellis plans to divide them among his first cousins. “It’s the right thing to do if we separate them,” he told his mother, “and everyone has one.”