About Us

Welcome to Stillwater Tackle Limited!

How did we get started?  Well it’s kudus  to our mad fisherman and founder  Regan Cooper that we are here. Read his story below…

Over 50 years on the Gulf

Regan has fished the Hauraki Gulf for over 50 years. He has seen it at its best, and he has watched it change. Ask him why he built the Cooper DehookerPro and the answer starts with the water: he wants to see the Gulf come back to what it was, and he kept watching released fish that never stood a chance.

He knew the routine too well.

A fish comes into the boat, hits the deck, gets wrapped in a towel while someone wrestles with the hook, gets dropped, picked up, dropped again. 

By the time the hook is out, the fish has been out of the water for four or five minutes. It goes over the side and floats away, and people wonder why it didn't swim off.

Undersize fish, the future of the fishery, end up as food for the shags and seagulls.

The day with the dog shark

Getting a hook back from a shark is dangerous work, and for years the practical answer was to cut the gear off and let the shark swim away with it, which gets expensive fast.

One day, a dog shark’s spike sliced deeply into Regan’s arm - he lost a lot of blood and ended up in hospital.

Lying there, he made a decision. The dehookers on the market didn't work well enough to trust near a set of teeth, so he would build one that did.

His first prototype was made from plastic pipe and garden hose.

He tried it on a fish hook, and it worked.

That was the moment he realised he had something different to anything on the market: a tool that reverses the hook 180 degrees so it comes out the way it went in, instead of being ripped back against the barb.

20-odd prototypes and a few near misses

The idea was the easy part. Regan went through ten to fifteen versions of his own, then another ten or more with manufacturers, paying for every iteration until the tool did exactly what it was designed to do.

Finding a manufacturer at all nearly ended the whole thing; more than once he came close to giving up on commercialising it and just making a few for his own boat and his mates'.

He didn't, because the tool kept proving itself on the water.
Snapper first, then kingfish, sharks, bluenose, gemfish, hapuka, bass, kahawai and trevally.

And voila - here we are :)