Van Staal
(4 products)
Van Staal created the concept and emergence of high end spinning reels near the turn of this century. They became the reel of choice among discriminating surf anglers on the East Coast, and their acceptance grew to a national and international level. Their one problem was funding, and in the early 2000's that caught up with them. The firm was sold, to a much better funded outfit, one we've all grown up with from the freshwater side of things, the present owners are the folks from Zebco. Zebco furthered their move into quality saltwater gear with the purchase of Fin-Nor not long after acquiring Van Staal. We've followed them since, and in 2011 pulled the trigger and brought in the line after seeing that Zebco truly is committed to building their saltwater presence, and the quality of products they offer. (I should note, we also represented ZeeBaaS reels, created by the founder of VS. However, while they have shared similar strengths as the old Van Staal product line, they suffered from a lack of funding - familiar tale - and lacked the ability to grow their product line.While we represent ZeeBaas I can not express strong support of the line given history). Zebco has demonstrated their ability to expand upon the lines they've purchased during the 2000's, and in 2011 improved upon their acquisitions product lines significantly as you'll note below... Given the parent companies financial strength, long term parts and service support is nothing less than excellent. That's exactly what you should expect from reels of this price level. Later on Van Staal was acquired by Pure Fishing which is the parent company of Penn and many other brands which gave them more leverage to upgrade the internal reels. From a performance standpoint, corporate standpoint, design and construction, Van Staal spinning reels are the products which all others try to compare themselves to...and invariably come up lacking. These are the finest spinning reels made, period, end of story. They have the history of record catches to make the statement, and they back it up with testimonials from most demanding anglers in the world.
