Tough Season Continues

The weather has been better through this point in the year than ever, but I continue to have a tough early season. A lot of the difficulty has been due to outside concerns, mostly work. This week, however, a major blow was struck, as I was in a car accident that luckily left me uninjured but without a car. The worst part was that I lost the battery for my boat's trolling motor and two rods, as well as having to take on a new car payment in the future. The odd and surprising thing has been that fishing with fewer rods (and thus fewer options for changing baits quickly) has been fun and informative. I lost two spinning rods, and until now I never really knew how much I relyed on them. I did a lot of my fishing with spinning rods that until now I didn't know would be better done with baitcasting gear. In short, I used spinning rods for light-weighted plastics, topwaters, jerkbaits, unweighted plastics (including soft-plastic jerkbaits), drop-shots, and just about anything else that seemed to work on line 8 pounds or less in weight. That's a lot! I fished for a few hours today, all from shore, and found that most of my presenations could be covered with baitcasting gear, and with better control. So why did I use spinning rods so much until now? A few reasons. One is cost. Baitcasting reels in particular can be expensive, and seemingly for good reason. The first baitcaster I used was a Daiwa Megaforce, and at the risk of sounding like a bitter person I will say that it nearly ruined me to the whole experience. As you will find in earlier posts here I was not happy with this reel. The big reason was the lack of a centrifugal brake. Centrifugal brakes control the cast at the very beginning, which in my limited experience is when most backlashes occur as it is when most of the spool's momentum is generated. All Daiwa reels, until recently (I think) are made with this set of free-spool brakes, and for that reason I can't see using them. At any rate, a lot of baitcasters that have centrifugal brakes are expensive, and for that reason I avoided them. And when you think of it, spinning reels can handle many of the things that baitcasting rods can handle. There are a few drawbacks to spinning reels: line twist is the most obvious, and heavy line also poses a challenge. Because line is no allowed to lay onto the spool as evenly as it is on a baitcaster it's forced to twist over itself and tangle more readily, and when you twist heavy line you create even bigger problems. For most anglers, however, these matters rarely come into play, so the choice is obvious. Where baitcasters excel, in their accuracy, is also a concern that most casual anglers don't need to take into account. Pitching and flipping are not only where baitcasters are at their best, they're also where they've had their greatest influence and in applications that most weekend warriors wouldn't think twice about tournament competitors concern themselves with casting accuracy to the point of near-obsession. Clearly there is nothing wrong with either approach, but each serves their purpose and nothing more. So why would someone who fishes 4-5 times a month buy a baitcaster over a simpler, more affordable spinning outfit? No one knows, NO ONE. Most, if not all lures can be thrown with some kind of a spinning outfit, and all spinning rods can throw lures with accuracy. Pitching is maybe the one technique that baitcasting rods can do that spinning rods cannot. But for most of us that isn't a loss.