Fishing Hats - dedicated or generic items?

Every fisherman you meet will have his own view on fishing hats. Some will tell you that a hat is a hat and baseball cap will serve the purpose as well as anything. Others will show you their collection of dedicated fishing hats that they have collected over the years, until eventually they found the perfect fishing hat for them (or not, in which case it could be quite a collection of fishing hats!).

The most widely accepted "traditional" fishing hats are the bucket hats. These fishing hats generally consist of a cotton type material (usually denim or canvas) with a soft, steeply slanted brim. Think of Colonel Henry Blake in MASH for a prime example. His standard headgear was a buket hat with fishing flies around it. Sean Connery wore a bucket hat when he played Harrison Ford's father in the Indiana Jones movie The Last Crusade. This style of fishing hat keeps the sun out of your eyes without risking any "involvement" with the business end of your fishing tackle and as mentioned above, is acknowledged as the standard in fishing hats.

However, my personal preferance lies in a similar hat known as a Boonie hat. This master of fishing hats is simlar in many respects to the bucket hat, but with a brim which comes out at more of an angle from the head, rather than running down at such a steep angle. If you are struggling to picture it, just think kid's sun hat then make it of heavy rip-stop cotton and colour it green (or camouflage if you prefer). Many branches of the world's military now issue them, particularly for desert and jungle use - obviously with different camouflage! Fishing hats with a military heritage - what more could you want, as the military tends to use quality, as so it should, given what those guys are putting on the line so can sit here and type this. However my real reason for preferring them as fishing hats over the bucket style is that they keep the sun off my nose even when relaxing back in my chair watching a float bob gently on the surface or a bite indicator rest easy as I sip on my afternoon beer. As fishing hats go it has everything - breathable, hard-wearing, does the job of a hat (protects crown, nose and ears (unlike a baseball cap) from the sun and has plenty of places to stick flies, lures, hooks etc when you run out of hands - or even for longer term storage.

So - when looking at fishing hats, buy a boonie style would be my personal recommendation. Buy a bucket style would be the majority recommendation, and use a baseball cap would be the cry of your wallet, if you have 10 spread around the house already - the choice of fishing hats, as with everything else, is ultimately yours.