The QuickLine System

In a little skiff with a tiny tail-tillered motor that my Dad rented from Alabama Jacks, a notorious biker dive bar at that time that was close to some fanastic snook spots abutting the Florida Keys. Very fishy water. That day I hooked a sand shark, and not a small one either. Bigger than me, at least.

“You’ve got bottom,” my dad said, glancing back at me. “I’ll help you in a second.”

“No,

daddy,” I replied with my little Zebco rod nearly bent double. “It’s a fish.”

“It’s bottom, hon,” my dad said. Gimme a second. He took one more beautiful cast at a particularly fishy spot in the mangroves. By the time he’d reeled in, so had I, and then we both saw the shark. In a single fluid motion, my dad pulled out his fillet knife and cut my line. The shark, which grows larger and larger in my memory, slowly swam off. Needless to say, I was hooked on fishing, and have been ever since. I spent my youth in a much kinder and gentler Miami, FL, fishing from just about anywhere I could reach water. There were a lot more of those kinds of places back then, not like today when kids are met with gated communities and security guards and no fishing signs. By the time I was a teenager, I was a fairly accomplished fisherman. Jump ahead to Summer, 2002. My dad and I arrive at his parents’ vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard. We both know this will likely be one of the last times we’ll be here together, as the place was getting to be too cumbersome to care for, and was not long before being put up for sale. One of the great pleasures we’d shared over the years was surf fishing at Wasque Point for bluefish. When the riptide was in close, you’d tie on one of these beautiful old single hook cedar plugs and launch it out as far as you could, then reel like hell ass fast as you could. On the good days, the big blues would slam those plugs like a ton of lead and you were on! These were big, beefy fish, and they required big, beefy gear. So the day we arrived, my Pop and I went straight to the garage to survey said gear. We found it to not be in what anyone would call tip-top shape. The rods and reels looked useable, though long neglected. The line on the other hand was definitely not. I began stripping off the old, brittle line from one of the big surfcasters that appeared to be the least worse for wear. Those reels held a lot of line, and the old line I was removing began to make a gossamer pile of curled monofilament at my feet. My dad started washing the lunch dishes, with his back to me. About halfway through that first reel, with the second one seeming to mock me from the kitchen table, my arms were tired from stripping line. There was already a huge mess of discarded line and I was only a quarter of the way done! I mused to my dad that there should be some way that I could get all the line off at once, like if the top fl**ge was removable or something. My dad literally dropped the plate he was washing and spun around, startling me.

“Now THAT would be a better mousetrap,” he declared. The idea stuck in my head. All through the rest of the time it took to de-spool the two huge reels, and the time it took me to wind on the new line, and all the way to Wasque Point (where the riptide wasn’t close enough), and all the way back. The idea stuck with me. On the way back to California on the plane I sketched out the first diagram. Interchangeable line cartridges. Just like the razor blade concept, but for fishing reels. When I got back home, I told my best friend Tim, who I’d grown up with in those halcyon days in South Florida. He agreed it’d be a huge improvement. So we went to a mechanical engineer. Built the first crude prototype. Got the first crude patent. At the time, that was as far as I could take it. The money ($60K that I’d gotten from liquidating a retirement account) ran out . At that time, there was no such thing a social media, no Facebook, or Youtube, or anything even like that. So I went back to the classroom, but never forgot about the QuickLine System. Every time I went to buy line, or a reel, I half expected to see it on the shelves. Flash forward to 2015, and one summer day my friend James sat me down at his computer to show me a Kickstarter campaign his girlfriend had run for an independent film she was helping to make. I had just that year done a successful crowd-funding campaign for a Ukulele Club at my school. Maybe this was the window for QuickLine to rise again. I found a new engineering group, and we did a new model, a better one, and obtained a new patent, which is much broader in claims than the original. We took it to ICAST 2016, and the response was amazing! So that’s our story. We’re revolutionizing the way fishing line is used. Life’s too short to stop fishing!