How To Spool Braid On A Baitcaster

Hey folks, Glenn May here with BassResource.com. And today, I wanna talk to you about spooling braid on your baitcasting reel. There's a couple little tricks about that you really need to know in order to get the most benefit from braid.

First of all what I've got here is a spooling station here from Berkeley. I really like this, I've had this for, I don't know, two or three decades now. I don't know how long I've had it, but it works really well, it's inexpensive, great way to put your line on to the reel. You just attach your reel here, put your spool here and you're ready to go. If you don't have something like this, you can do it the old school way. The way I used to do it is just take a pencil and put it between the...in the hole there on the spool. I'd take the line, put it through my rod, and then I'd literally hold on to the spool with my two feet. Just grab the pencil on each side, hold it between my feet and then I can just reel it on that way. But this spooling station makes it a lot easier, it's not so awkward. So that's why I use it.

All right, the first thing you need to do is put your glasses on if you're my age, and then...so you can see what you're doing. You wanna take the line, you wanna put it through the eye, this little eye of the baitcaster. And then with a lot of these bait casters these days, they've got these little holes like a waffle ball here in the spool. That makes it great, you can stick your line in that and then just crank your reel just a little bit. Remember if you get like a six to one gear ratio, one full turn of the reel handle's gonna turn that spool six times. So you don't need...you just need to bring it round once. It'll bring that line through. Now you're ready here. 

What you wanna do is tie an arbor knot. This is a real simple knot, you just do a quick overhand knot, and once you have that done, you clip off the tag end and that prevents any problems once you get to start spooling the line on. You won't have any issues there. And now you just tie one more overhand knot onto the line that's coming through your eye.

Now what you gonna do is you gonna cinch it down tight by pulling it through the front of the reel, and what'll happen is that knot will hit that first knot that you made. It's gonna hold it in place so it won't come undone. 

The last thing I wanna do is I wanna take a little piece of tape here, just a little piece of scotch tape, real thin, and put it right over that knot. That helps hold it in place on the reel and kinda buffers that knot a little bit so it doesn't cause any problems when you're putting the line on.

Now here's the trick with braid. First of all, clench your drag all the way down as tight as you possibly can. Now grab a nice terrycloth towel. Don't use a leather glove or any like that, but a nice terrycloth towel. You wanna grab a hold of that line, and what I do is, I'll show you here. I grab it like this, so I kinda put a kink in the line, I wanna put as much pressure on it as possible and I hold on to it and I crank it on. And I put a lotta pressure on while I'm cranking it on.

Here's the reason for that. With braid, a lotta times if you get a backlash, the braid'll dig into itself on the spool and it makes it really, really hard to get that backlash undone. So here you wanna apply as much pressure as you can, and the key here is, you don't wanna put your fingernail in between any of the line. And it's packed real tight, I can tell. Pack it really good and tight, make sure you can't get your fingernail in there. When you do that, the line can't dig into itself and you solve that problem.

But here's an added bonus. What happens is the line spools off the reel a lot easier. And that's important when you're flipping and pitching, it makes it a whole lot easier. The line just comes off just like butter, so it's great.

Okay, and once you have it up, you don't wanna fill it up all the way, you wanna leave about an eighth of an inch of line left to the edge of the spool. The reason you wanna do that is because when you depress on the button on the reel, it actually is kind of a lever. It comes open at the top, but it presses down on the bottom, and if you have too much line on the spool, it's actually gonna touch that line and it's gonna inhibit the way for your casting, it's gonna cause a problem. So don't fill it up all the way, at about there, and that's about right. 

Now that you're done, you just clip off the line, put it on your rod, spool it up, and you tie your favorite lure and you're ready to go.

Hope that helps. For more tips and tricks like this and for the answers to all your questions about bass fishing, visit BassResource.com.