The first fish got away
The first fish we ever caught jumped out of the bucket and went straight back into the river.
That was the Georges River, early 2000s. We were kids with rods our father had bought us from the markets, spending our weekends on the bank and our Friday nights making our own bait for the weekly barbecue. We never caught anything bigger than a twenty-centimetre bream. We didn’t know what we were doing, and there was nobody around to teach us.
We didn’t mind. Being out there was the point.
Buying a tackle shop on a whim
Fast forward to 2015. We walked into a tackle shop in Liverpool to buy a fishing light for a family trip, and walked out having bought the shop.
There was no business plan. We didn’t do much research. It simply felt like the right decision, so we made it.
The reality arrived quickly. The shelves were close to empty and the business wasn’t doing well. We soon found out it owed money to a supplier who wouldn’t send us stock until the debt was paid. Then we learned we couldn’t open accounts with several of the major brands at all, for geographical reasons that had nothing to do with us. And underneath all of it sat the thing we couldn’t buy our way out of: we still had an enormous amount to learn about fishing.
That first winter we turned over less than ten thousand dollars. It wasn’t enough to cover the rent.
Learning, and then teaching
So we learned. We asked questions, we listened to customers who knew more than we did, we got out on the water, and we got things wrong until we got them right.
Somewhere in there we worked out what the shop was actually for. It was never going to be about selling as much gear as possible. It was about making sure the next kid who walks in with no idea what he’s doing gets the help we never had — the right rod for where he’s going, the right rig for what he’s chasing, and someone who’ll take five minutes to explain why.
This country is worth getting out into. Everyone should get to experience that, and nobody should be locked out of it because they don’t know where to start.
Two stores
We grew, slowly. In 2018 we moved out of the original Boundary Road site on the Hume Highway to our current Liverpool store on Hoxton Park Road.
Then in 2024 we bought our second store, at Chipping Norton. It came from the man who, almost twenty-five years earlier, had sold our father the rods he gave us at the markets.
We didn’t plan that. It just happened that way.
For our father
In March 2026 we lost our father, Haj Khaled Kheir.
Everything we build from here is dedicated to his memory. We think about all those weekends he spent driving us up and down the Georges River, stopping at spot after spot, hoping we’d finally catch something worth keeping.
He also taught us how to do business: honestly, and with integrity. That’s how we run these two shops, and that’s how we’ll keep running them.
Come and see us
We’re open seven days across both stores. Whether you’ve been fishing for forty years or you’re buying your first rod for your kids, come in and have a chat. Ask us anything.
We’ve been the ones standing there not knowing what to ask.