Turning To The Darkside...

Matt Godfrey takes Maver’s mid-range marvel for a spin at a very testing Lindholme Lakes!

Poles in this price range really do have their work cut out. For the Maver Darkside Series 1 you can expect to pay around £1,200 for the 14.5m package or £999 for the 13m version. In my experience, you see poles of this ilk in more situations than any others. Serious pleasure anglers, club match anglers, and top-end matchmen will all be seen with poles in this bracket.

On reflection, I feel like this kind of pole really needs to be an all-round tool, and reading the specifications on this pole that’s exactly what this is intended to be. Here’s how my workout with it went!

The Package

What exactly do you get for your money with the Darkside Series 1 packages? First there’s the pick of a 13m or 14.5m version. Talking to anglers, I know for certain that there are loads out there who never fish further than 13 metres, so I can see the appeal of the 13m package. At first I was unsure if this was a good thing… what happened if you wanted to fish 16 metres? But then, I actually thought about how often I had fished that length, and it’s hardly ever! Time would tell if the pole performed at its 14.5m length.