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 Trout Reels I am a reel junkie. I have old ones, modern ones, light ones, heavy ones, American ones, English ones and always seem to be accumulating more. I've bought many and tried even more. I use them all, so my reel-mania has taught me some useful lessons or at least caused me to form strong opinions about reels. Most of my fishing is for trout, usually with tippets of 5X or finer. I also get to fish for sizeable trout (16-20"), so the reel definitely comes into play. When I'm fishing for 10-12 inchers the reel is basically irrelevant because I play the fish without having to use the reel. Here are some of the lessons I've learned: 1. Disk drags, no matter how beautifully designed and carefully made, are worse than useless. Remember, we're talking just about trout with light tippets. A disk drag on a small trout reel is a waste of weight and material. With 5X or 6X tippet, the goal is not to put the brakes on the fish, it's precisely the opposite. You want the reel to give line smoothly, without either overrunning or hesitating. The smoothest disk drive, made with Mercedes Benz precision will do that, but a dry patch on the disk or a bit of dirt may cause the brake to grab ever so slightly - plenty to break off a running trout on 6X. The spring-and-pawl system, humbly known as the clickety-clicker, is actually far superior. You have no chance of putting much pressure on the fish and there is usually very little variation in the amount of tension that can be put on the outgoing line. All the clicker does is keep the spool from overrunning and make a pleasantly exciting scream when the fish is running, and that's all you want it to do. If you do need a little extra pressure, a palming rim will give you that option. Almost always, however, it's "crank when he stops, let go when he runs" - simple as that. The old fashioned Hardy spring-and-pawl system, still in use after more than 100 years, remains perfectly functional. Many other manufacturers, including those who make high-end, high quality disk drag reels (e.g. Abel) have adopted similar clicker systems for their light trout reels. Making a 4-weight reel with a disk drag by just reducing the size of a tarpon reel is not doing anything useful. Maybe some people buy them out of hope or vanity, thinking they will regularly battle 6 pounders on their 4-weight. 2. Large arbors are nothing new, but they are better With all due respect to the modern manufacturers, they were not nearly the first to recognize the substantial benefits of a large arbor. I have two Hardy reels, a St. George and a St. John, made about 70 years ago, that have a large arbor spool. They were also made with a regular arbor, so you had a choice. They even had another innovation that made the line come in even faster. The handle was set a bit closer to the center of the spool rather than out near the rim, so your hand need travel a shorter distance to take in the same amount of line with each revolution of the spool. The benefits of the large arbor - faster retrieve, less line coiling and more even drag pressure - have been repeated often. So has the criticism that filling a regular arbor reel with backing accomplishes the same thing as having a larger arbor. That criticism has a grain of validity to it. Some reel manufacturers have made large arbor spools to fit their preexisting regular arbor frames. While this was a quick and expedient fix, it doesn't take full advantage of the large arbor. The new spools are the same outside diameter, but have a larger arbor, thus reducing their line capacity. A 10-weight reel becomes an 8 weight, but where's the advantage over just filling the 10-weight spool with more backing? The newer spools are more heavily ventilated, so are reduced in weight compared to a 10-weight spool with extra backing, but the advantage pretty much ends there. It would have been better to have a large arbor reel with a wider (thicker) spool to maintain the line capacity while enlarging the arbor. That, however, would have required redesigning both frame and spool - a much better, but more expensive, strategy. The best large arbor reels seem to have been designed from scratch rather than being modifications of preexisting models. 3. Where weight really matters - the spool For all our fuss over reels, a fly reel is one of the simplest devices around. It has basically one moving part - the spool. The rest of it just sort of sits there. Weight shaved from the moving part, the spool, is far more important than weight saved elsewhere. The lighter the spool, the less the inertia that needs to be overcome to start the spool moving. With a heavy spool and no drag at all, a fish can break a light tippet by taking off fast and snapping the line tight against the inertia of the spool. A lighter spool reduces the chances of the immediate break-off. By the same token, the lighter the spool, the less momentum it builds up once it is spinning. That means you can use a lighter setting on your drag/click mechanism to prevent the spool from overrunning. A lighter spool means that you have the double advantage of needing less tension to prevent an overrun and having less tension to worry about in avoiding the immediate break-off. 4. And the winner is... As you might have guessed, I favor a clicker reel with a large arbor and wide lightweight spool. The choices are extensive, with almost all reel makers adding a large arbor model to their lineup. My first choice is the Waterworks Purist series. My Purist P2 has the lightest spool of any reel I've seen, an adjustable click and a large arbor, wide, shallow spool that will hold a WF 5 or DT 4 and all the backing I need. Its minimalist design also reduces the frame to a sort of cage for the spool, so its overall weight is also the lowest of any reel of its size. The same plant makes essentially the same reel for Sage, with some mainly cosmetic differences. Both are expensive - about $280 for the P2 - but if you want the best, it usually is. A reel I had before settling on the P2 as my favorite is the Loop Dry Fly model. It has a huge arbor and very shallow and wide spool. It gobbles up line in a hurry and is clean, elegant and innovative in appearance. The big spool is surprisingly light for its size. It too is expensive. Two fairly minor complaints keep it from being my first choice. The spool runs on three hard plastic rollers, and if the tension device isn't backed off between uses, those rollers can develop a flat spot. I sometimes forget to relax the drag and don't want to worry about having a reel that goes bumpety-bump when it turns. The second reason is aesthetic - it has no audible outgoing click. When you grew up on Hardys and Medalists, you can't easily kick the habit. There are other fine large arbor reels on the market. I suggest that you compare the spool weights and the overall weights for reels of comparable capacity - say WF 5 with 100 yards of backing. I would go for a reel without disk drag that was explicitly designed as a large arbor reel, meaning it will probably have a wide spool and frame. 5. But! I'm convinced that, functionally at least, there is no better trout reel than the modern lightweight large arbors I've described. There really is a bit more to the simple fly reel than meets the eye. If you spot me on the stream, however, I may well have one of my heavy old Hardy Perfects or some oddball reel attached to my rod. That's because there's nothing that sounds as good to me as an old Hardy Perfect screaming at the speed of a dashing trout. Or maybe I'll be fishing the old wooden Nottingham reel I use to remind me that "aircraft grade 6061T6 aluminum bar stock machined on computer-controlled machinery" isn't all that necessary and isn't all there is to flyfishing. Questions and comments to: nelson@henrysforklodge.com |
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