Even if most of us don’t regularly hook up with fish that take us into the backing, we buy reels as though we’re going to do so. Ya gotta be prepared, right? And of course there’s nothing like a complicated new toy.
I confess to being a fly-reel addict. I’m not going to mention how many reels I own, but it’s fewer than 30 and over a dozen. And then there are extra spools, of which I have even more. My excuse used to be that it was foolish ever to part with a reel, because one of my stepsons or my wife might need it. But they soon all had their own gear, so my current excuse is that it’s too much of a chore to keep shifting fly lines to a reel I want to use when the correct line is already on another reel or on the plastic spool on which it came. I guess what’s pretty clear here is that my addiction is the lines’ fault.
For 5-weights, for example, I now have reels or spools filled with two different-colored floaters (one hi-vis, one brown), two full intermediates (one opaque, the other in clear/camo), a 10foot sink tip, a 30-foot Type VI sink tip, full sinking lines in Type II and Type IV, and one with backing and mono for use with shooting tapers. Things are just as ugly with 7-weights and 8-weights, though not so bad with 3s, 4s, 9s, 10s, 11s, and 12s. I guess it’s fortunate that I don’t fish any 6-weights. And I still have to shift a line or two from one reel or a plastic spool to another reel or spool half the time I go somewhere.
I suppose it’s not entirely the lines’ fault. Reels are seductive in a different way than rods (and don’t ask about how many of those I have in my locker), which pretty much have to be cast or at least assembled to be fully appreciated. A fly reel provides tactile feedback even when it’s not fastened to a rod. You can fiddle with a reel while you’re sitting in a comfy chair with a drink on the table beside you. You can admire the machining, spin the spool, take it off and put it back on, twist the drag knob, and strip out some line to see how much or little resistance it offers. For some of us, that makes them the equivalent of new shoes for a fashionista. So, what do we do to ensure a good fit?
Size matters, of course. My sense is that it’s best to go with the largest-diameter reel you can find for a given rod, consistent with your notion of appropriate weight and balance on that rod. Long before large-arbor reels became the norm, some of us fished reels intended for line weights a couple of sizes larger than the line we spooled. Their larger diameters took more backing to fill the spool — or some bulky cotton string beneath the backing — but we got the benefit of greater spool diameter and thus more line retrieved every time we turned the handle. And when stripping off line or when a fish ran it out, payout was smoother, pulling against the longer radius. Larger arbors do this naturally.
Whether a reel has a large or a regular arbor, you don’t want to overfill a spool. Whatever reel you choose, leave some space so that if you crank in line sloppily or under low tension, it won’t jam up against the reel frame’s crossbars when you least want it to… such as when you’ve got a fish right at the net.
The fit of the reel’s foot to your rod’s reel seat can also be an issue. Years ago, it seemed as if every maker had a slightly different idea of what a reel foot should be. It even varied within a brand. Among Hardy’s reels, for example, the feet varied considerably in both length and thickness, depending on when they were made and the model. The fly-fishing industry trade group attempted to standardize reel-foot dimensions in the late 1980s, but despite doing so, there’s still a surprising amount of variation between different manufacturers, particularly when it comes to the fit with slide-band reel seats. Try before you buy is the watchword.
Easy spool removal is something you probably want to look for in a reel. This has become common in the past decade or so, but that’s not the case on some older reels. If removing the spool takes a tool or has you juggling a loose part, you might want to think twice. On the other hand, how often do you change spools when fishing? And even if you do so frequently, going slow and being careful will rarely set you back more than a minute or so.
Conversion from right-hand to left-hand wind is another consideration, and again, this is pretty much a feature on most contemporary reels. You’ll likely do this only once, when you first buy the reel, and it’s generally as easy as flipping a lever or pawl or turning over a clutch. But some reels require considerable disassembly, and if you’re mechanically inept, it can be a pain.
While I’m on the general subject, let me weigh in on the “which hand?” issue. It used to be that all fly reels were set up to crank with the right hand, a leftover from the days when it was traditional to cast with the right hand, then switch the rod to the left to play a fish. Doing so let the right-handed — that is, most folks — crank with their dominant hand while resting their casting arm. This began to change, to the distress of traditionalists, when spin fishers started coming into the sport in the 1960s and 1970s. They were used to having the handle on the left side of the rod, wanted what they were used to, and argued that
it is silly to cast right-handed, hook a fish right-handed with loose line in the left hand, and then pass the rod across from one hand to the other to take up slack and play the fish. The best argument the traditional righthand crankers have for doing things that way is that winding with the non-dominant hand is a handicap, since most of us can’t crank as fast with it as with our dominant hand. I know I can’t. But I still crank left-handed. Why? Because I can make acceptably quick little circles with my non-dominant left hand, even when hooked up to fast saltwater fish, but I can’t play or fight a fish worth a damn with anything but my right hand and arm. “Wimp,” says the traditionalist. “Probably,” say I. Which method is correct? The answer is: “yes.”
What about drags? For most trout anglers, who only rarely hook anything that runs out line, much less anything that requires a drag, a reel is simply a place to store a fly line. For that, a simple floating line and grandpa’s Pflueger Sal-Trout will do fine 90 percent of the time. Even for bigger trout and bass, landing a fish by simply stripping in line can be effective, though perhaps not as satisfying, as playing a fish off the reel. One of the best trout fishers I know, who owns a place on a spring creek that holds lots of hefty trout, strips in most fish. “Takes too long to get them on the reel,” he told me. “And stripping them in is easier now that 6X is almost 4-pound test.” The same goes for dinky stripers in the Delta on 20-poundtest tippets.
A note here about automatic fly reels — you know, the kind whose spools wind up with a spring. Pull on the lever that sticks out from the reel, and the spring unwinds, turning the spool and bringing in line. They were popular back in the 1940s and 1950s, but are heavy and for the most part don’t have a handle or a drag. But they worked, and someone must still like them, because new ones are still sold by companies such as Pflueger and Shakespeare. I inherited my late mother-in-law’s old Shakespeare automatic — the type that mounted on the side of the reel seat like a pancake, instead of below it like a tire — when I lived on the lower Umpqua and used it as a paperweight for years. I was fishing for smallmouths four or five evenings a week throughout the summer, casting from my canoe, and it occurred to me that since I was stripping in these fish, for the most part, the automatic might be a good way to keep a mess of line off my feet. And it was. I still stripped in fish, but with the automatic, “zip, zip” went the spring, and loose line was back on the reel and out of the way in seconds. Crank it up after releasing the fish and do it again. Just don’t hook a steelhead by mistake.
That noted, competition trout anglers in Europe, who mostly fish nymphs Czech style with a short length of line, frequently use semiautomatic — not automatic — reels. Semiautomatics don’t work off a spring, but have a lever that’s connected to a ratchet gear on the spool that takes up slack line. Pull the lever, and the spool turns four or five times. Some of these reels have decent drags and a crank handle, as well, so you can play a fish off the spool. The good ones aren’t cheap. Italian Vivarellis and French Fulgors will set you back between $400 and $600. I’ve yet to try one.
With fish that do take out line, you can do a lot with a simple click-and-pawl drag of the kind for which Hardy, Young, and other British reel makers are famous and that many manufacturers still produce. Apart from resistance produced by an outgoing click, sometimes adjustable for tension, you increase resistance by adding finger or palm pressure on the rotating rim of the reel or by increasing the angle at which you hold the rod. Resistance also will increase as line pays out and the line radius against which the fish pulls line off the reel decreases. (That’s another argument for a large-diameter or large-arbor reel, since the radius doesn’t change much when line is pulled off.) Click-and-pawl systems work relatively well for the great majority of trout fishing. I also suspect that more steelhead have been taken on click-and-pawl reels than on reels with mechanical drags, but only because that was what was available when there were more steelhead and fewer reels with anything else.
Increased drag resistance, however, is only part of the story with regard to modern improvements in reel design. Smoothness is just as important, and the good thing about most click-and-pawl reels of decent diameter is that they’re generally pretty smooth. Still, for anything that does take out a lot of line — big trout in big rivers or still waters, big steelhead and salmon, most saltwater fish — a reel with a disc drag of some sort makes a lot of sense. I used to think that smoothness matters more than drag, and I happily fished click-and-pawl reels for coastal steelhead. But there wasn’t a lot of current in those estuarine situations, nor were the rivers very wide, and fish rarely got 50 yards away. On a big river in British Columbia with some large, hot steelhead, I put away my Hardy Marquis Salmon after a single day when I discovered how much extra work it was to hold strong fish against the current with no drag to help or slow them effectively when they wanted to scoot. The rest of the week saw me fishing a large-arbor disc-drag reel. Its outgoing resistance could be set to just where I could hold a fish, but still let it run against decent resistance when it wanted to do so. The switch to that reel allowed me to land fish in half the time as with the Hardy. It was better for the fish and gave me more time to find the next steelhead.
Heavy, fast saltwater fish are also easier with some sort of drag, and I marvel at the stories of the old Florida hands fishing for tarpon with big Pflueger Medalists, with a hole cut in the noncrank side that exposed the spool so an attached leather patch could be pressed against it to add resistance, or Lee Wulff taking a marlin with a click-drag reel from Sears. Give me a Bauer or a Galvan or an Abel or a Hatch or another reel with a smooth mechanical drag to tighten or loosen as the situation demands. Let it have hardly any start-up inertia, so that line pays off without a jerk. And please let the drag knob be on the frame side of the reel, so I can get to it without dodging a spinning handle.
The great majority of modern fly reels are anodized sufficiently to tolerate exposure to salt water, but that doesn’t mean you needn’t clean them after fishing the salt. A good swish in fresh water every day is generally adequate to get salt off external surfaces when you’re on a trip. High-pressure hose treatment is a bad idea; you don’t want to force salt water into places that are hard to get at or that require significant disassembly to clean. Taking the spool off and rinsing it separately is recommended by some manufacturers and discouraged by others, who want to keep water of any kind out of the reel’s innards. Betray your gender, if you’re a male, and actually read the instructions that came with the reel.
Most modern disc-drag fly reels have sealed or semi-sealed drag modules, but caustic salt water has an unerring way to get into places where it shouldn’t. When you get home, you can take the reel apart, strip it down as much as is recommended by the manufacturer, wash and dry it thoroughly, and lube it, if that’s called for. Finally, no anodizing stands up well to multiple years of proximity to salt-encrusted backing. Every once in awhile, or every year, strip both line and backing from the spool and clean the accumulated grunge/salt from the sides of the spool. If you can soak the backing in fresh water, that’s also a plus, since you won’t be reinfecting the reel you just cleaned when you spool up again.
What about new reels versus used and vintage models? The best fly reels ever are being made today, though some of us seem to feel the need to sell or trade them in every six months to get something even newer. My reel addiction has been supported, in part, by reels that my friends want to sell off. And then there’s the old stuff that still works fine. If they’re in good shape and not too scarce from a collectible point of view, you can get them for lots less than the equivalent new reel. Forget the Bogdans, Fin-Nor Wedding Cakes, Seamasters, and left-hand-crank Hardy St. Georges, but there are scores of nice used Hardy Lightweights, Young Beaudexes, Orvis Battenkills, Lamsons, and clattery, but eminently serviceable old Pflueger Medalists out there. It’s not like they’ll require a replacement timing belt or a rebuilt transmission, as a used car might. They also frequently come spooled with the backing that the previous owner was too lazy to remove, and sometimes a fly line. A penny saved, and all that. I hope to see you at the next meeting of Reel Addicts Anonymous.
