If you have old fishing tackle gathering dust and taking up space in the garage, pause a while before you throw it out. Last year, a Hardy "Perfect" reel from about 1886 fetched £17,000 sterling just for a little brass reel.

Used reels so long as they're not dented or damaged from having fallen on rocks or having been stored in a wet bags dating from 1890 to 1896 can be worth "a four-figure sum".

But Mr Charles Graham Campbell, fishing tackle specialist at Christie's in Glasgow, says that top prices are being made for more recent reels too. A 1936 Hardy "Cascapedia" the name of a Canadian salmon river which was made of a sort of black ebonite, like Bakelite, sold for £6,900 in April 1996: "There were not many of them made. They look like an American reel, with lots of chrome like their cars."

If that old fishing trophy you own which never quite appealed to your aesthetics is top of your hit-list for discarding come the next jumble sale, know that a plaster yes, plaster trophy of a 42pound salmon sold for £3,335 at Christie's in Glasgow just over a year ago. Trophies made by producers like Hardy, Farlow or Malloch are "quite sought after", according to Mr Campbell.

In Christie's last fishing tackle sale, a display board from an international fisheries exhibition in 1883 "just a board made for an exhibition, a mount, framed up, with a print of a salmon with bits of tackle around it" fetched £1,955. Mr Campbell said: "It was a one-off and over 100 years old. Think about it, paintings sell for more than that."

Flies also sell well. An attractive fly maker's oak cabinet in a pigskinned case, with several cardboard boxes containing exotic feathers and hooks, sold at Christie's recently for £3,910.

Dating from about 1920, it would have been used for making elaborate salmon flies.

Meanwhile, a book in two volumes on fly fishing by Frederic M. Halford, Dry Fly Entomology, published in 1897, sold for £1,265 in October 1996. The second volume had cards set into the pages with the flies and it was in good condition.

Mr Campbell says: "We sold a box of flies, a Malloch fly cabinet a metal box with 12 lift-out trays and a leather case. That sold for £3,450 in October 1996. All the trays had clips on it; the clips held the flies. It dated from circa 1910. It was an Edwardian artefact."

Even wicker creels the baskets into which fishermen put the ones that didn't get away while casting for the ones that did can earn a tidy sum.

Christie's sold a wicker creel some years ago for £572; and just over a year ago a wooden creel fetched £1,092.

Mr Campbell says that rods tend not to make very much at auction. They're "not easy to display" and "they don't do very well. They're not collected in the same way as reels are."

Rods which do make good prices tend to be presentation rods with engraved initials. For example, one such rod "looked smart, with a simulated ivory handle and other rare or semi-precious simulated decoration like malachite a green marble". That sold for £920 but was "very much the upper range".

Mr Campbell says that most rods sell for between £100 and £200. "The smaller the rod the better. A six or seven foot rod will fetch more than a large salmon rod. People like to buy them to use them. They like the action of the old rods."

He says that US fishing rods can be "exceedingly valuable" because "collecting over there is more advanced".

The next fishing tackle auction at Christie's, Glasgow, takes place on October 21st.