It’s easy for me to tell when it’s winter, but this has nothing to do with the weather.
It was sunny and mild today. The weekend’s skiff of snow is a faded memory.
So, it’s not the weather that reminds me it’s winter as weather has become an unreliable tool for determining seasons. Instead, I know it’s winter because I spent half the afternoon online, shopping for fly reels.
I’m more obsessive about this bit of gear than most fly fishers. Those of us of a certain age know that a fly reel was once considered little more than a line-storage device. In those bygone days, we fought fish by hand, using the pressure of our fingers holding the line, as a makeshift drag.
We stripped in fish while the line gathered at our feet. After we landed a trout (because we fly fished almost exclusively for trout in those days) we’d make sure the nail knot that connected line to leader was clear of the rod tip, then we’d false cast that rat’s nest of line back out to the fish.
That’s how I did it in my early years, when I only occasionally played a trout on the reel. Occasionally, such as when I was float tubing a lake somewhere in the Sierra and got into a fish big enough to take line at will. But even then, drag was human powered. The click-and-pawl drags on older reels were just noise makers, exciting noise makers when you hooked into a big one, but anglers usually slowed a running fish by palming the exposed spool, not that clicky thing inside.
That’s how I did it for much of my fly-fishing life, and the palming-the-spool method worked just fine for the trout, bass and panfish I targeted. I later got a job selling fishing equipment, however, and I taught myself a few tricks about reels. I was motivated to reconsider what I knew as my paycheck depended on it.
For starters, I learned to appreciate the drag setups on modern reels. Saltwater fly fishing is the fastest way to learn how much drags matter. Once you start catching fish big enough to take you well into your backing on every hookup, buttery smooth drag systems with low startup inertia — meaning it doesn’t take a lot of torque to get the spool spinning again when it’s at rest — become your best friend.
Not every run is linear. Fish stop, then run again. When this happens, reels with high startup inertia snap tippets. It’s the same when you apply too much pressure on an exposed spool.
Once I became a salesman, I sold myself and became a convert. I started paying more for better reels and got into the habit of playing fish from the reel whenever possible. My new approach saved me some fish — both because of the better mechanical drag and because the pile of loose line at your feet leads to tangles, and tangles mean high-startup inertia.
There have also been times I was so fixated on getting the fish on the reel as quickly as possible, so the drag could earn its keep, that I misplayed fish, especially fish running toward me, allowing my barbless hook to slip out of the beast’s maw. I enjoy playing fish on the reel whenever possible, but we must remember, the first thing an angler does after the hook set is get the fish on a tight line. This is especially so if you’re fishing barbless, which is the only way to go if your game is catch-and-release.
I’ve got my eye on a couple new reels. I buy machined aluminum when I can afford it. Billet reels are lighter yet don’t bend as easily as cast.
I just hope we get more snow. There won’t be much river this summer if we don’t.