The Fascinating Story of Van Staal: The Sealed Surf Reel With A Cult Saltwater Following

Van Staal: The Sealed Surf Reel With A Cult Saltwater Following In 1987, a small machine shop in Stamford, Connecticut opened its doors. Its owner, Robert Koelewyn, was making aircraft seat supports and food tray arms from aerospace aluminum. Nothing about that business suggested it would produce one of the most coveted fishing reels in American history. But in 1992, Koelewyn built his first Van Staal spinning reel — and everything changed. This is the full story of Van Staal. How a precision machinist identified a problem that every major reel manufacturer had ignored: saltwater destroyed every reel on the market, and nobody was building one that could survive it. How Koelewyn applied aerospace-grade CNC machining and a fully sealed, waterproof drag system to create a reel that could be submerged, covered in sand, and come up working. And how that reel — priced at nearly five to ten times the cost of a standard saltwater reel — built a devoted cult following on the East Coast through pure performance, with no advertising, no marketing budget, and no corporate backing. We also cover what happened when the money ran out. How Koelewyn sold the brand in the early 2000s, walked away, and then built two more reel companies — ZeeBaas and 3-Tand — chasing the same engineering ideal. How Van Staal passed through Reel Ventures, then Zebco, then landed inside Pure Fishing's portfolio in December 2019 under the ownership of private equity firm Sycamore Partners. And how, through three ownership changes and a relocation from Connecticut to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the sealed machined design that Koelewyn built in 1992 survived every single transition intact. Van Staal reels still retail between $509 and $1,059. They are still made in the United States. The cult following is still there. This is how a machine shop built the reel that the surf fishing world could not forget. 👉 Get the blueprint. Catch more fish. Spend less money. https://legacyfishingfrank.gumroad.co...