bulldog1935

actually, most of the pushing that gets done on this forum is when people ask about high-grade tackle and platitude posting ensues. The psychology of that result isn't real pretty. The topics of most threads are clean and simple. Projecting is what messes them up. At some point, everybody cares about how their gear functions, and what may improve the function - if not, I guess be proud of frugality blinders, and keep them on topic. On topic, a nice bass sight-fished on $70 ebay venerable Phillipson glass from the early '70s. ok, make that two. These guys were tricky. They would not hit a fly dragging in the current - had to high-stick and drift.

It's the home market that sets the price - similar for Breaden and NorieS. They don't have to leave Japan to sell.

@BassWhole! I wasn't fishing for flounder, but was putting a buddy from out west on a tide pass between the flat and big bay. The lure was Tsunami SS3. My buddy was catching specs faster than I could count - seriously, after I set him up, he caught 5 before I got rigged. Speaking of flounder on fly rod. Cedar Bayou is the cut between Matagorda and San Jose islands. Jean Lafitte used to scrape off the Mexican Navy by retreating into the 4-mi bayou. It's a 15-mi boat ride from anywhere. One December day with a Teeny TS-250 sinking line, slowly dragging on the bayou sand, I caught 40 small flounder on consecutive casts. Could have caught more, but it was cold and a long boat ride home.

Flounder (= fluke laying on their other side) are really tough to lift. I had a 24"er spit the hook on me after a half-dozen solid set attempts. The fish was slowly creeping toward the big bay and taking drag the whole time. This was on my MH rod. I lifted him enough to see him, and that's when he spit. (I did land one this size once on fly rod) In Cedar Bayou tide pass to the Gulf one day, we watched a guy across the bayou battling a flounder for most of an hour. We each limited on specs, and the limit was 10 then. When he finally beached the thing, it would have blanketed a coffee table.

Absolutely. Just don't dunk it, and rinse it well - light water flow, not pressure. I used to rinse mine daily, but now I'll fish them for 3 or 4 days and rinse when I get home. This Lew's BB-1NG fished inshore for 20 years, and there's nothing salt-proof about this reel.

the times I've fished Roostertail (though I agree with jack it up and put a Panther-Martin underneath) - oh yeah, Roostertail - snap it until you can feel the resistance of spin, then retrieve however you want. You just have to overcome inertia to get them started.

those are Really, Really Like - great-looking spinnerbaits

Easy for me, I take only baitcasters (tuned for 3 weight ranges), unless I know I'm going to be fishing in the dark - then I swap spinning tackle for niche(s) and usually just fish it in the dark or until my dark lure plays out with the daylight. My "plano" boxes cover offshore, surf, inshore, bass and I'd need another boat to bring everything. May slide lures around between boxes before I go, but pack just what I may need for today in the milk crate.

I use Ray's SV spool on this bass rod, and covers the wide range extremely well, and will still cast the 2 g to 100' - PE#1 X-braid, 22-lb test. Agree w/ @redmeansdistortion, the light lure end doesn't engage the SV complication, and after you set the mag brake for the lightest thing you're going to throw, the SV takes over for everything heavier. I swap to Roro-X fixed rotor spool and the long rod shown farther above for my light-lure salt niche. The lighter Roro spool has a slight distance advantage, though surprisingly, the rod length doesn't make that much difference - the biggest difference it makes is ease of aiming the long cast (and the shorter rod is more accurate in close). Noteworthy, the long small game rod and Roro-X spool fished 3 g farther with more reliable casting accuracy than a similar small game spinning rod would fish 5 g.

Yet those titanium heat exchanger tubes I mentioned flattened to ribbon under exactly uniform external pressure from a constrained film of steam in low pressure water. There's an instability in that compressive hoop stress - when it's no longer round, it's no longer uniform hoop stress, and has no choice but to flatten. The instability is addressed in ASME VIII-2 design. External Pressure Design with COMPRESS | Codeware TX PE No. 75665 The calculation isn't my bailiwick, I gave that to a PhD ME. The Engineering Science is exactly my bailiwick.

The ZPI Alcance LS is out there with 5.6 gears and 11-g machined spool. This reel is essentially a bench-raced-out Revo X.

It's not an issue with most solid spools, because they have enough stiffness they can withstand the extra tension. It's an issue with 5-g honeycomb spools that will let you cast 2 g. It's also not an issue with PE braid, since braid doesn't stretch. But you want some elastic shock resistance, so you use leaders that will stretch and absorb shock.

@waymont if you load long enough line under elastic tension, it gradually relaxes shorter and crushes the spool: Same way mono used as backing can blow the side plates off fly reel spools. It's honestly not something I would ever want to see, but the principle is sound. https://www.hedgehog-studio.co.jp/product/3868 * Caution * If a lot of nylon lines that are thinner than the lines indicated in the line capacity are wound, there is a risk of spool damage due to swelling and contraction due to the water absorption peculiar to nylon lines. Please be careful. ■ Precautions when using When When winding the line on the spool, applying too much tension may cause damage. Especially when winding a stretchy line such as a nylon line, loosen the tension before use. I have seen titanium tubes in a low-pressure heat exchanger that crushed to ribbons because the film of water surrounding them flashed to saturation steam pressure.

The titanium-wire pike leaders from Ukraine (Mako) and Poland (Dragon) are awesome, and the micro swivel will eliminate the last possible source of line twist. I use them in the salt on all spinning tackle. 5 or 6 kg is plenty, and just about as fine as braid. They also have elasticity, tensile and shock toughness that stainless wire doesn't have. I put 1" perfections loops at the business end of my fluoro shock leader, and loop-on paper clip, titanium bite trace, or cigar cork for my rigs.

I always used spiral for free-shrimping on an old Millionaire 6H with 7' bay rod. That's a bare hook with a live shrimp, essentially weightless, and a centrifugal cast like this gets you the greatest possible line velocity and cast distance without any jerk that might pull the shrimp shell off the hook. You can make a pendulum cast equally soft - it's the final centrifugal acceleration that puts it out there. You just can't make a spiral cast with a long leader, and pendulum works there - that's what we do in the surf with long leader and almost always baited hooks.

yeah, but it's freaking fun to fish 3 g out to 120' and have the ability to cast 2 g consistently to 100'

If you had made this a poll, I'd vote option 1 for BFS spool. If you reel isn't Alphas Air, I'd go with the sniper, and maybe add an aftermarket BFS spool (Roro or Ray's Studio) for braid. Mono/fluoro isn't a great idea on light BFS spool because of line stretch possibly crushing the spool. You want the leader for some measure of shock resistance. I've really been having fun with PE#0.8 (16-lb) Duel X-wire braid. This is my Steez SV with a Roro-X spool - the 2-mm-deep spool holds 100 m. On this shallow spool, digging isn't an issue, where it might be on a stacked deeper spool.

+1001 on proper manual bail technique to completely eliminate wind knots 101%.

Still, most of you guys don't get the imaginary spending OP's imaginary money here. Shoot for the stars, like a ZPI Zpride, which is a bench-tuned Metanium or one of Don Iovino's custom Ambassadeurs Always have to wonder why these threads turn into platitudes, but the psychology isn't pretty.

no offense, I've never found the need for a drag clicker. I can always feel the hysteresis through the rod when my fish take drag - certainly every redfish takes drag, and all except small seatrout. The only kind of clicker that I think about is the external kind, normally disengaged, and I'll use it for offshore trolling alarm or as a bait feeder (in the surf) with freespool.

The whippy part sets me back - they did make long deep-flexing noodle rods at one point, Okuma still offers noodle rods, but most new rod tapers copy the Japanese small-game/rockfish rods with fast progressive taper. The only whippy part is the extreme tip on sold-tip rods. Otherwise, these rods are Fast, and have reinforced butt sections for turning big fish. I personally would go with Tubular tip, to get the job done with nothing whippy. I've filled this niche for more than a dozen years with Japanese rockfish rods. NS Black Hole (Korea) makes excellent rods, under-priced for their quality to sneak into the Japan market, and this example in S762LT from reliable ebay vendor gets my recommendation. If you want the Cadillac, I'd watch Plat New In Stock for models of Yamaga Blanks Blue Current that don't last long in stock. If you really want a really long rocketship rod, I just noticed Plat has stock of Major Craft 8'6" CRX-864E E multipiece, and Yamaga Blanks flagship 85TZNano. I have the 83TZNano, and it's the longest-casting spinning rod I own (short of 11' surf). Fighting fish on these rods, especially in current, is like using a fly rod. You keep the rod low to keep the butt and reel drag doing all the work.

I need to figure how to do this on a bicycle. In Laguna Atascosa NWR, they closed roads to vehicle traffic 15 years ago because of ocelot kills. Now the only way to get a kayak to Rattlesnake Bay or Stover Cove is to paddle 5 miles one-way (much farther to Stover), or mothership to one of the cuts in in a power boat. If I could work out a good bicycle trailer, could pedal the NWR roads to Red Bluff and Realitos to launch. We've done the long paddle from Tomae park before - makes for a long day. seriously fishy water - shallow grass and sand holes - I hooked up a sow trout that had to be 30", but she tore the hook The Arroyo is a branch of the Rio Grande delta (was the main channel 10,000 years ago), and the NWR roads couldn't possibly be more flat. Rattlesnake Bay is on the left.

Congratulations on your new reel - searching on your reel's brake system, which turns out is the identical unit as Lew's combo brake, I ran across this Oz guy on how to adjust it. Revo® 4 Infini™ Brake System Overview - YouTube I'll admit to cutting my teeth on Big Game mono - that was on a Millionaire 6H in the late 70s. Got spooled by many bull reds in the surf, and always had a bulk spool around. Even still have a piece of old spool from the 90s, though it's 12-lb I graduated to on all my reels, which was sufficient even for killing my old Penn 4400SS on king mackerel. Here's that reel from the 90s loaded with Big Game - just retired this reel 2 years ago, and it still looks like this. What you gain with mono/fluoro, simply because of its stiffness, is ease of recovering backlash. This is also what you lose with braid - the total limp of braid makes it more difficult to recover backlash, because you can get sharp, folded loops that are difficult to even find. Though some forum members began with braid and never looked back. I'll put in a plug for 12-lb Seaguar fluoro as go-to for most fishing, and all the right qualities to learn on baitcaster.

Most photos of Shimano Metanium DC that google turns up show gunmetal brake cap. But you're right, this is the photo TackleDirect uses TackleDirect is one of the best vendors, period - their customer service has always jumped through hoops for me. I bought a Steez SV TW recently, and the photos and trim color varied significantly from different websites - gold vs. red. Asian Portal states on every listing, the colors on reel photos displayed may not exactly match what you receive.

It's kind of a seller's market anywhere right now. If you don't like packing and mailing, craigslist still works. I've been shipping rods and reels around for 20 years (including Japan, Malaysia, UK, even Australia), and don't mind packing and USPS Priority Mail, buying postage online. Over the last couple of months, I quickly sold two reels and a spool on BR forum's Fishing Flea Market | Fishing Classifieds (bassresource.com) I've been selling tackle on tackle forums, especially including antiques, cane and glass fly rods and vintage reels, for a long time, and I'm pretty good at accurate descriptions and good photos, which tend to make people want to keep looking at your listing, and to know what to expect from you.