I get a lot of people asking me how you make your line last longer, and one of the biggest things I see, and I know probably some of you guys already do this, but some of you don't, because I know Iaconelli, I mean, some of these fishermen I see, I fish against, they don't do it and I'm amazed by it. When I first get a reel, we'll get to knots, answer any questions later about it, but when you get a reel, you have reels now, make sure you don't fill them up with fluorocarbon or mono. That's like one of the worst things you can do. So, say you have a reel that holds 200 yards of 12 pound, put 100 yards or so, 150 yards of braid or dacron.
You can use the stuff they use in the ocean, the cheap, white dacron stuff. You can get it cheaper. You can use 60, 80 pound. It doesn't really matter. I use about 60 pound because a thinner diameter is easier to tie your fluorocarbon to. It holds better than real thick dacron. But that will save you money and it will keep you from putting more line on your reel than you need. Plus, it makes your spool a lot lighter. So, you'll notice you'll get 10-20 feet longer casts. And when you're pitching and flipping and stuff, I always tell people if I can pick one out of ten rods when first pitch or cast, I can tell you which one's all fluoro and which one's got the backing on it. I can pick it out real, you can actually tell the difference immediately. As soon as you go to cast it, it'll be heavier.
So, I do all my reels backing. I do a lot of my spinning gear that way too. But you don't need to. That's just in case I go ocean fishing and there's red fish or something. I hooked, like, a 35 pound red fish one time. It took almost my whole spool out and I had braid backing, so it would have been gone otherwise. But mainly I do that just for castability, to make it easier to cast. I can pitch smaller weights because of it. Maybe if I had solid fluorocarbon on there and I'm pitching an eighth ounce weight with a small bait I might back lash 10 or 30 times without the backing on there. So the backing just makes the spool spin quicker and easier.
