A Line from your President…
I hope you are all doing well and staying safe. I know it seems like the stay home and social distancing mandates have been going on forever, but this too will pass. With that in mind, now would be a good time to prepare for the eventual reopening of both salt and freshwater fishing. Here is an article from Fishing by Derrek Sigler that I borrowed to inspire you to prepare for the eventual openers. Cabin Fever Fishing Reel Maintenance Since you’re stuck at home, you might as well get ready for fishing season. Cleaning and maintaining your fishing reels is a great way to pass the time. It helps you to relax and drift off thinking about past fishing memories. You paid good money for your fishing reel, so you might as well take care of it. Your reels take a beating during the long fishing season. You should run off all the old line and remove the reel from the rod. If you held on to your owner’s manual, you’ll likely have step by step instructions on disassembly. For most of us, however, that owner’s manual went with the packaging into the recycling bin. No worries, you can find schematics and step by step videos on the internet for almost any reel. You’ll need a good set of precision screwdrivers, a clean surface to work on and some good lighting. You will also need cleaner, lube and grease for your reel, along with the proper tools to take the reel apart and clean the internals. Clean and lube everything and be careful not to lose any parts. If you don’t want to take the reels apart and do the full-on clean routine, you at least need to oil them. Lubricant is vital on all the moving parts, especially if you fish a lot. There are two main reasons why you should replace your line right now. Line memory is one of the major reasons to swap it out. The line on your reel can get used to hanging out on the spool and it will want to retain that shape when you cast it out. Unless you can latch onto a big fish on your first cast of the season to stretch out your line, you can end up with tangles and other not-so-fun issues. Fluorocarbon or braided lines don’t have this problem much. Secondly, you can have nicks, knots and other nastiness on your line that you don’t even know about. How would you like to have a monster on the business end of the line and have it break you off because you accidentally rubbed the line across a harsh surface last season and there was a small nick in the line? In addition to the information in this article, another precaution I take when taking my reels apart is that I use my camera to take a picture of my reel at each stage of the brake down. This helps to remind you where everything goes. I also go on You Tube where you can find step by step videos for maintaining almost any kind of reel. I hope you have found this information helpful. I also want to remind everyone that the May meeting has been canceled. Let’s hope that conditions will be better for a possible June meeting.
Tony Smock President
“So Many Fish…...So Little Time”
