bulldog1935

no offense, but double uni is the problem. My Allbright knots zing through microguides (snake guides on fly rods, too) I've been rolling these knots 40 years, though. With braid, I use Improved Allbright Knot. The cross section is 1/3 of a double uni, and no single bends to break. The key to getting a good knot is proper tightening sequence. Remember the direction you rolled the braid loops. Begin tightening the braid tag while you roll the braid loops in that same direction, to make the knot smaller. Lightly take up the standing braid slack that forms at the far end of the knot. Before the braid tag and loops get snug, tighten the mono tag to shorten the mono loop. Back to rolling the braid loops, this time, get everything tight with the braid tag. Finish by pulling both standing ends, braid and mono. Helps to tighten this knot under a magnifier. I also wet the finished knot with a drop of super-thin super glue (Zap CA+) knock off the excess drip. I put a perfection loop in my standing leader, and fish everything loop-to-loop. A paper clip or micro swivel loops on beautifully. If you prefer tying direct to lure, you can loop-to-loop a sacrificial length of leader. (this is a titanium-wire micro trace and an intenional 1" perfection loop, so I can also loop-on a cigar cork)

Fuego has magforce z, and as I also mentioned above, stock Boost spool on Steez and Zillion SV won't cast 1/8 oz to the distance of my linear mag brake Super Duty - 90' v. 120' 7' ML, all reel mag brakes dialed to incipient backlash +1 My linear mag brake Alcance will cast 1/8 oz beyond 130' (with shocking spool speed). Noteworthy, the Steez and Zillion will duplicate this longer distance with Ray's Studio BFS SV spool. (Roro-X spool will cast 1/16 oz that far) of course, none of them cast with this, which I can't cast in my back acre, anyway

The Vanford 500 is the Soare with a facelift - it has locomotive drive, and is only offered in USM (JDM already has Soare). The Vanford 1000 is worm drive with the longer spool pitch of Stella in the same sizes. Each worm-drive Shimano reel introduced since '18 Stella swaps parts with '18 Stella - - '19 Stradic and Vanquish, '20 Twin Power and Vanford - they all share Stella's overqualified roller-bearing clutch. They all share the same labyrinth seals as Stella. (they all share Stella's sucky line roller, which can be fixed with a great part made by MTCW) Stella has stainless steel drive. The other reels all have alloy drive. Stella has magnesium body and rotor. Vanquish has magnesium body and CI4+ rotor, and shares titanium bail with Stella. Vanford is CI4+ body and the same CI4+ rotor as Vanquish. Vanquish is the lowest-inertia reel ever made, Vanford is the lightest by 10 g. Stradic has aluminum body and a different (heavier) CI4+ rotor. Twin Power has aluminum body and rotor. Stella and Twin Power both have lower rotor deflection (strain) than the others. Stella, Vanquish, and Twin Power are bench-assembled with parts-matching in Japan - they each have BB metal spool (magnesium/alloy) and BB worm-gear pawl. Vanford and Stradic are assembled on the Malaysia line - they have bushings in the spool and worm-gear pawl, and CI4+ spools.

we couldn't be more cool, friend.

Interesting that I didn't suggest any, except for rod keepers, and pointed out you can't keep rods in those gunwhale tubes while running the boat. Your console has the same type of vertical rod holders as my dad's boat above - that's where you put your rods to run. Actually, the most versatile locking rod holder especially for LP baitcasters is Stealth QR-1, but Stealth and Scotty work with the same base. Here's one I have set up on a Scotty Gearhead mount that's part of my kayak milk crate. I really like Scotty's Gearhead mount, but their fixed bases are nice, too. Scotty's Baitcaster/Spinning rod holder is perfect for round baitcaster, and locks it in, but sucks with a low-profile baitcaster, and does a great job locking in a spinning rod. Scotty's fly rod holder is also the singular best, and works very well with a spinning rod, too. A really neat idea on fiberglass is Seasucker - I have one base for my hand-laid kevlar kayak (fiberglass) - with a built-in vacuum pump, you can lift your boat with them, and they keep their vacuum for a couple of days. This one I added a Scotty gearhead using 1-1/2" 1/4-20 stainless all-thread, add a Stealth rod holder or a Scotty fly rod holder

Those tubes in the gunwhales are there for convenience, and are made for boat rods with long and big-diameter handles. With a rod handle like this, they'll work for trolling or dropping bait. But don't consider them to be safe for keeping rods in a running boat. It's never a bad idea to have a working keeper on your expensive rod and reel. also note how these jigging and trolling rods bottom-out in the rocket launchers and keep the conventional reels upright. It's because the rods and tubular rod holders have mating gimbals. You haven't told us much about your boat. The type of rod holders usually found on center consoles are good for securing bay and bass-size rods in a running boat. If you want locking rod holders with good permanent and clamp-base options, you probably want to look at Scotty.

Riding the Cumbres-Toltec from Chama, NM and a side trip to fish the Rio Chama

I take advantage of welded loops on my fly lines, or add them to lines without. I swap leaders to fish between dries and nymphs. For dries, I fish tapered nylon without a tippet knot, and will go to 6x for presentation. Literally for decades I've fished Beartooth/H&H braided butt leaders for nymphs and my first love of swinging wet flies. I know all the good BWO riffles/chutes/pocketwater on our tailwater, and may bust a long way to get there - this is Mad Rock (named by the float guides). The Beartooth/H&H leaders are knotted fluorocarbon below the braided butt. You charge the braided butt with mucilin, and it's all the strike indicator you need. When it swamps, you wring it out with a piece of chamois. The float of the leader butt also keeps your fly line tip from swamping. Of course its easy to swap tippet size, dictated by the size of the hook eye. Swimming BWO on size 18 scud hook will let me fish 4x Like all tailwaters, tiny midges make up 70% of the biomass. Size 22 is the smallest hook eye that will take 5x tippet. Unless you find first-light spinners or that great afternoon dry fly hatch, tiny midges are the only thing that works in slower, deeper runs. If you're forced to size 24, has to be 6x. A trick I learned from Frank Smethurst when we filmed TU On the Rise, for attractor with tiny midge dropper, take a quilting needle and run an Otter's milking egg up the leader, slide up a bare size 10 egg hook, tie your dropper tippet with a triple surgeon's knot. My PB buck just above took the size 22 midge. The same day in a deep chute, this little girl took the egg - she's on the bare hook, and the egg slid up to my split shot. Bottom, center you can see the size 22 midge dropper. At the end of the day, when I'm done with this complex rig, I'll snip it above the split shot, and tie surgeon's loops in both sides. The rig goes into a leader wallet, and I loop it on next time out. Frank has to catch trout on camera every week. His description of Otter's milking egg - "when you absolutely, positively have to catch a fish right now" Another thing Frank taught Jimbo and me in 3 days of filming - skittering a sofa pillow to work trout into a feeding frenzy. In this last pool, we had them impaling themselves on anything, I handed my Thomas rod over to the cameraman, and he caught his first trout. Frank also called our big tailwater rainbows "Guadalupe steelhead" me, Frank, and Jimbo

that's a great book if you're going to tie flies also, Orvis has some excellent tutorial books that take you through different fly tying techniques by having you tie flies. They're even free pdf's Orvis Fly Tying Manual [PDF] Download Full – PDF Read Book Page Don't ever think you need to buy a fly tying kit. Much better to target a few patterns, buy the vise and tools, hooks and materials for those flies only. Hook & Hackle is exceptional for shopping, and their low-grade house-brand vises are worth owning. Vise, bobbin, good scissors, whip finishing tool.

that wing is backwards from normal cats whisker, but that's a good pattern for bottom-bouncing. I have David Train's pattern in Mike Dawes' book. It's such a useful fly for 50 years, there are probably many variations out there. Keel hook-up is best for bass and snagless - keel hook-down is the safest for trout.

The wing is on top on cats whisker. The difference is how you keel the hook, up or down, by which side of the shank you tie the bead chain. The best fly rod bucktail is Hi-Tie - this takes jacks and king mackerel here's my tiny whistler for nite-lite dock fishing - it imitates glass minnows, shrimp, and even swimming crabs. Size 6 1x-long

When I filmed an episode of KT Diaries on our endemic bass, KT and I had a nice rivalry going over Clouser v Cat's Whisker. It couldn't just be little endemic bass on his show, so I took him to private water the 2nd morning for largemouth with shoulders. Got everything they needed here in 90 min. They got footage of a bottom-bounce take right here - a 5-lb bass attacking the mudballs the lure was kicking on the flagstone. If you're making mudballs, it doesn't matter what fly... ...but if your fly is suspended, and you're trying to keep your retrieve slow until that garbage-can mouth opens, can't beat cats whisker.

The original fly made by David Train was yellow body, white wing and tail. I published an article on the fly in 2002 and had David Train's, Mike Dawes' and Ian Colin James' permission to use it (who published it before - back when we did things like that). 3x-long streamer hooks are best, and size 8 is what I tie most, but I even tie them on 4x-long size 4 salt hooks. Match the bead chain size to the hook size. The clipped bead chain both rattles and whistles. The colors can be attractor or blend. I tie them in mix of olive and gray, all gray, all black, mix of sand and brown or rust. I fish a lot of clear water where blend colors are best. I've brought up balls of cyprinid minnows, and couldn't tell the fly from the live bait. They high-stick a great dragonfly nymph, and I've caught some monster carp that way. Here's tan and rust in the gar's mouth - this and green-and-gray are the two I tie the most. In turbid water, attractor colors are best - white, yellow. The best striper fly mix I found was gray body, gray tail, and light olive wing. I haven't bought any flies in 40 years, so I can't help you there. Here's the size of a striper fly in the mouth of a smallie - I was swinging for stripers. On striper flies, I use a pair of marabou blood feathers over a pair of saddle feathers for the tail. among my friends, it's a common joke to ask what fly I'm fishing. Here's a link to the pattern.

cats whisker - in fact, substitute bass with Everything.

Linear mag brake Abu is going to shine there. Your only source of backlash with weightless rigs is mid-cast wind backlash, where linear mag works best. Especially casting light weights, there's something to be said for mag brake and a good clean spool flange with no brake add-ons hanging on. The Daiwa wants more weight. I'd guess you're trying to cast hard to force more distance, and probably getting start-up backlash. Super Duty btw, I ran into similar problems with Lew's centrifugal brake - just couldn't get distance with 1/8 oz, and Super Duty linear mag laughed at it. There was probably a way to set up fewer centrifugal shoes and make it work, but I simply sold it and bought another Super Duty.

yes, it's been gone a long time, and the current G1000 MTC, a great rod in its own right, is Medium (closer to ML, but fast as the dickens). You gave us a budget to work with up front, and if Rogue River Special was still available, either it or G1000 wouldn't meet your target. You pay a premium for US-made rod blanks. I included it mostly so you could read the length, line and lure ratings - those you can duplicate on most of the rods I mentioned. I've caught mackerel on RPLX7 (TS-250) and suspended snapper on 10-wt (TS-450), but it's something you have to want to prove compared to the lower effort of fishing conventional tackle. Where fly tackle always shines is sight-fishing stealth.

With stock Daiwa spools, not even my Steez and Zillion can cast light weights (1/8- 3/8 oz) to the distance of my Lew's Super Duty. (The Daiwa SVs are a different story with the hot aftermarket spools made for them). Super Duty is the same basic linear-mag-brake design as Abu, and honestly, with its heavy deep spool, Super Duty doesn't seem on paper like it should cast as well as it proves out. It's also not a very fast spool - just seems to keep going. However, Daiwa SV lets their stock spools cast big weights much more reliably, and with little or no linear mag dialed-in. If you want an opinion, Daiwa homogenizes their spools for reliable casting with big lines and a wide weight range, leaning toward the heavy end. What I gathered swapping notes with Jun Sonada at JapanTackle is that Magforce magnets aren't quite as powerful as newer SV magnets. Agree with everyone about using zero spool tension, regardless of reel brand. However, you may find reels with linear mag brake cast big weights more reliably if you dial in a little spool tension. The most shocking distance caster I've played with lately is ZPI Alcance, an Abu with magnesium spool, hot bearings and tuned mag brake. As far as backlash, it can happen in 3 places with 3 different causes - start-up, mid-cast, and finish-cast. We might be able to tell you more if you can identify for us which you have. Also lure weights you're trying to cast.

Can't argue with centrifugal brake as just about the best for spool start-up with big weights. But I can see a good mag brake working better at the moderate spool speeds where skipping is critical.

and here's the fastest reel spool I've ever used - - Roro-X BFS spool on magnesium-frame Steez SV TW - - it's like surf-casting, but with 1/16 oz

How's your thumb? You haven't told us anything about your experience with baitcasters. The best choice will depend mostly on your experience and skill. If you don't have the experience, you may like the DC better. Experienced casters have mentioned that DC is their go-to for casting into wind, or casting a buzzbait with its built-in parachute. Hollowbelly swimbaits cast like rockets, and shouldn't need DC, even casting into wind. Shimano sells DC as ultimate distance, but it's really a distance trade-off for cast reliability. If you can set up the reel to fish the range of baits, to me, nothing is more fun in casting than a reel with a lightweight, fast spool - the lighter the spool and line mass, the faster the spool, the less brake needed, the more fun. Not that everything is about casting distance, but if you have the set-up to cast farther than you need, then you're fishing with less effort, and using your rod control and thumb to hit your target. Every set-up has a sweet spot, and not far past that is probably backlash. I was describing to a friend yesterday the reel with the second-fastest spool I know, as, this reel as not for the faint of heart.

On a family vacation sweep from grandparents in TN, west to friends in MO and on to cousins in WY, Dad took us to Gibson's to pick out our first rods and reels. Mine was Heddon 236 spinning combo. At Lake of the Ozarks, I walked up to a cove, saw a sunken log, skittered a Johnson's sprite across the top of the log and let it drop, landing a 3-1/2-lb smallie on my first cast. Seems that reading water is instinctive for me. Went on to rainbows on spinners in Big Thompson R. and more rainbows in WY lakes on flies below clear bobber. Dad saw the interest in me, bought a 14' semi-vee and we started fishing. We mostly trolled for white bass, and got really good hitting early morning jumps on Lake LBJ structure (also why I bought my first fly rod). With the coast 3 hours away, we took the boat to sloughs along Aransas causeway, and regularly fished the jetties with our neighbor, who was another lifetime fishing partner for us both. Hill country river crossings for endemic bass on fly rod was all mine from the first time I could drive alone. Bass plugging growing up came from watching Virgil Ward, Canyon Lake and the lower Nueces R was our best bass water. We also had access to a couple of south Texas ponds (tanks) for crazy fish catching on spinnerbaits. When I went to college, my dad joined the local bass club. Dad's retirement included a nice bay boat, and annual fall trips to Key Allegro and S. Padre for a month-at-a-time. Grown, I made friends with a couple of coast guides, and traded them fly rod instruction for backwater trips. In church, I ran a fly-fishing life group, and took 4 to 14 friends somewhere in the hill country twice/month. I also give back on GRTU board, and run Trout in the Classroom for Texas. This is my dad on his 78th birthday trip to Estes Flats, and 2 years ago on his 90th birthday trip to Arroyo City (he looks 10 years younger holding his overnight stringer).

Spinning reels before 1950 had no kind of anti-reverse. I used to fish through anti-reverse dogs on my old Lew's, and they'd wake you up when they gave way - especially with a redfish at the boat - leaves you looking around for a third hand. My older daughter growing up always went first to this 1937 Luxor for creek fishing, and got really good at fishing without anti-reverse (half-bail, too).

I buy Eastern European titanium-wire pike leaders for inshore fishing. Unfortunately Mako Fishing in Ukraine quit selling to US during the '20 postal crunch. But I found Dragon brand leaders, and a Poland retailer who will DHL to US - his min order is about 20 leaders.

the main strand is the standing line in better terminology. Any good knot, you tighten the standing lines last - that means you have a knot that self-tightens in use. The ends of the line that don't go anywhere, and that you will trim away at last are the tag ends.

I always make sure the spool can be removed from the reel for maintenance and swapping spools. The flat flanges change to angled chamfers at the top of the spool. Fill to the top of the flat, you have room to wrap a leader and remove your spool. Our OP did just right filling his spool.