It's Snapper Time!

[YellowHammer]

I was using a slip bobber rig for speckled trout last week, shrimp make a popping sound when they flee from predators, and the slip bobber popping cork, about the size of a corn dog, really brings them in.  So bring the slip bobbers!

Although I have never gotten in front of a Bluefin, yes, these style reels are built for that and more.  As a matter of fact, on one of the Wicked Tuna shows last season, Cap Marciano started fishing with his "baby stand up rig" which was an Accurate rod and reel about 1/4 the size of his crazy big tuna tackle, and liked it. 


https://accuratefishing.com/collections/saltwater-fishing-reels

Accurate fishing reels,was founded by a family of Aerospace Machinists, and the reels were specifically designed for the multi day, offshore tuna trips from the San Diego Tuna fleet.  Customers get on board for a week or more, and the Captain steams for a long ways, they get on big schools of tuna, and many of the customers have to cast live bait for them.  They custom build each reel if you want, and they did so on one of mine.  They are made in America, and bad to the bone.  There are now lots of Japaneses and other copies, but Accurate reels are still arguably the best for the new generation of revolving spool reels.

The power issue @SawyTed talks about is a real issue, crazy heavy drags require a lot of cranking torque and super strong gears.  So Accurate reels come with a transmission, a low speed gear ratio that will pull a stump out, and a high speed gear for pulling in about 3 or 4 feet of line per crank.  The transmission is shifted on the fly if needed, by pressing a little button on the side of the reel handle.  Amazing technology, and super smooth.

I also have some of the new spinning reels, most of mine are Penn, and are literally just a little bigger than my bass reels, and about 1/2 the size of my old school huge spinning reels and have twice the drag and twice the line capacity!  A couple of my "new generation" spinning reels has 40 lbs of drag and they are so light that last year, I had my SIL on the boat and we were casting and catching mackerel with 1/2 once jigs.  I told my SIL to grab the "light" rod and start casting, and I did the same.  I looked up after a couple fish and he was using one of my "heavy" spinning rods that could haul in a dump truck, and when I mentioned it to him that he grabbed the wrong one he said no, it casts and felt lighter than his bass fishing rod back home!

There are lots of videos on the Tube of people casting and catching harpoon size bluefin and saltwater gamefish using these little guys.  Here is one of mine, a Penn Authority, 40 lbs drag, and it routinely catches 6 and 7 foot sharks that happen to eat our fish on the way to the boat.  I figure they are a couple hundred pounds, and they are too heavy for me to bring into the boat to play with.  I won't hesitate to pull in 4 foot sharks, even 5 footers, if it has one of my high dollar lures in its mouth, or I want to scare the passengers for fun.

I do have a collection of older saltwater tackle, and more than few reels that are "burned out" and the gears and stuff stripped of teeth and slagged up.  It takes a few fish to burn out a saltwater reel, and I can't bring myself to throw them out.       

     

[SawyerTed]

One thing that has made reels lighter and smaller is the crazy strength of a super small modern braid fishing line.  

Reels had to be big to spool enough conventional mono line or old Dacron because the line had to be a large cross section to be strong. The amount of line needed to subdue a marlin, tuna, ornery wahoo or crazy mad king mackerel is 100s of yards.  So the spools had to be big.  

Now a braid can be 1/2 or less the cross section and many times stronger than monofilament line. Spools don't have to be large to have the needed capacity. 

One thing about the smaller profiles with high drags is you better be sure of your rod holders and have lanyards on the outfits when trolling.  A hard strike with an unsecured rod can mean $$$$ gone in a second. 

We had a charter not long ago fishing the Gulf Stream from a 28' center console.  The charter was with a captain I've know 30 years.  Turned out he was sick.  He had a young backup captain to take us.  All was good.  

We were trolling grass lines for mahi and had a good hit.  The captain, (did I say young guy?) thought the fish wasn't hooked but I saw him with the bait coming toward the boat.  Before I could say something the captain picked up the rod and started cranking.  The fish realized he was hooked and ran.  The captain not a small guy at 200 pounds and over 6 feet tall was jerked completely over the leaning post.  It two of us to catch him, he was going overboard.  High drag numbers will do that. 

[Hilltop366]

Does anyone make a reel with a progressive drag that will start off lighter and increase with tension? 

[gspren]

The last braided line I bought was 40 lb test and the box said same diameter as 10 lb monofilament.

[YellowHammer]

I've had that experience!  One of the very first fish I caught with these outfits, I turned the drag to about "halfway" or so I thought.  I was absentmindedly jigging the lure up and down and a big "reef donkey" amberjack whacked it, the rod loaded up, the drag didn't slip and I got dragged down to the gunnel like a wet noodle before I knew what had happened!  The rod did a "gunnel slap" where it slams down and hits the gunnel so hard you can hear it.  A loud gunnel slap is also the unmistakable sign of an angler screw up, and typically draws laughter and ridicule from the captain, except, it was me.....

On old school star drag reels, the drag washers and such are pre set and pretty torqued down, and the problem with a long running fish is that if you think in terms of leverage, as the diameter of the line on the spool shrinks, it takes more physical force to pull the line from the reel.  So a reel at half spool of line will have twice as much drag as it did at full spool.  So from that standpoint, all reels have a progressive drag based on line diameter.  That's also why many reels are adjusted to "half drag" to account for a long running fish to not break the line as the reel spool shrinks.  However, that means at full spool, where most fishing is done, the reel is only using half its drag capacity.   

Or with "newbies" I will set the drag to 1/4 or so just to not "scare" them and to keep my rods from being pulled out of their hands in the ocean.  My niece hooked a nice fish a few years ago, and while I was occupied unhooking her husband's fish, and before she could yell "Help!" I heard the reel screaming in the background and saw the last few feet of a 400 yard spool of line disappearing.  She was frozen like a statue, if you've ever hear a reel scream like it's been tied to the bumper of a speeding car, you'll know what I mean!  I ran over there and started cranking down the star drag, but it took a few seconds and that was too long.  POW! fish gone...How do I know it was 400 yards?  When we got back to the dock that afternoon, I had to take the reel to a tackle store for a refill.  That was on a star drag reel, and the fact that the drag could not be adjusted fast was a critical problem.  With a lever drag, I could have reached over, slammed the lever forward, and would have been at full drag instantly. 

That's where these lever drag reels come in, there is a big lever, right under you hand, where you can change drag settings real time, during a run, while fighting a fish.  When a fish wants to run, and you want to keep the drag constant, just pull back on the lever and you can get to any drag setting you want.  Or on bottom fish, the first 10 feet of the fight is critical as they power down to the bottom structure to break off, so the reel is set pretty hard to winch them that far up, which is hard on the fish and the angler.  When they get up in the water column in a safe zone, the drag is eased off a little and the fish is allowed to run a little to keep the hook from tearing out of the fish and to reduce the pain on the angler.  If the fish tries to run back down, let them go a little, then if they keep going, just move the lever a little to tighten the drag to stop them, if possible.  So a lever drag adds a whole new dimension to fighting big fish.

[Hilltop366]

That makes sense, I was think more about when a fish strikes it would automatically go from a lighter drag to your set drag in a few feet just to take some of the "shock" out of the strike. 

[tule peak timber]

I just received my 14 foot, 6 inch high modulus carbon fiber rod today that was hand built in Italy. It is supposed one of the world's best casting sticks. A guy my age casually hit 701 feet two weeks ago down in Texas with an Italcanna and that is pretty impressive. My other rods are ODM brand, and I love them for flicking baits and lures. For lever drag reels I like Penn Internationals, tough, proven, and in spinners Van Staal does it for me with their massive drag system and they are totally waterproof. I'm going to practice; time permitting with this new rod and hopefully get away for a couple of weeks in December on a trip to the Gulf Coast looking for pompano. Fish on!

[YellowHammer]

That's going to be pretty cool!  I've heard of them but never seen one.  You ought to try down near Mobile Bay to tangle with some monster redfish, they are on the beach in December.  There was a guy a couple weeks ago on the surf bombing baits about twice as far as anybody else on the beach.  I only noticed him because we were drifting foot long croakers for Jack Cravelle, and wanted to stay out about twice as far as anybody could cast from the beach to not bother them, and this one guy could almost reach us, which was incredible.  Most impressive.  A two hundred yard cast is getting out there pretty far.  How do you keep the bait on?   

So I looked online, an Iltacanna vector, with a 5 oz weight, set the world record at just over 300 yards!  So you'll use a Van Stall?  Those are nice reels.  I guess you'll have to use a shock tippet to take the load, then splice or FG knot to the braid?  I assume a 4 carrier braid vs an 8?   

Here in redneck town, I had seen a guy using a surf drone to fly the bait out a long ways, but that was kind of "cheating" and I like the idea of launching a bait with a rod.

When are you going to have your first throw?  I couldn't wait unit the winter to launch one. 

I like Penn spinning reels these days, but I've hated them in the past, and still are not a real fan of their conventional reels, their gearings are made out of stainless, which is good, but the teeth profiles are pretty rough compared so some other reels also made of stainless, so feel like a coffee grinder.  However, the other brand reels I've burned the guts out of are bronze gears, super smooth but wear out.  So I am definitely a stainless steel gear fan.  I've been pretty happy with a bunch of Accurate over the years, I've never gutted one to slag, and they will take them back and clean and service them for free.  I've also had a few corrosion issues with Penn's, they like most companies, go through cycles - they were the best, the gold standard, then they became garbage, and now they are coming back on the upswing.  I've got a Penn in the back room now where the outside is corroded like it is 100 years old and a Penn Torque that I spent lot of money on, but it sits in the rack.  I like the Accurate reels because they will custom configure them as I want them.       

[caveman]

I'm too frugal to buy the class of tackle that Tule (Rob) and YH (Robert) are using.  For my bass tackle, just this past winter, I'd started replacing my Ambassadeur 5000's with lighter weight Revo level wind reels and newer (mostly used) rods (Spiralite) that I got a good deal on.  I would still be using my old heavy stuff, but the arthritis in my right wrist would give me trouble some days.  Heck, my primary worm casting reel was an old Diawa Millionaire that I inherited from my uncle.  I had one just like it that I bought in 1982 or so.

Most of my saltwater spinning reels are Penn's.  Some old Z series, some spinfishers (4500's) and a few red and black ones that I don't remember the model of.  I do have a couple of Fin-Nor spinning reels.  My old 3500 sized one is about worn out.  It has landed thousands of fish.  I have another bigger one, probably a 6500 size that has a really strong drag (?40 lbs) that is mounted on a Vexan rod.

Most of my saltwater boat reels (level wind) are either Penn's or Diawa Sealine.  I prefer the Sealine's.  I've had some of them since I was 14 years old.  The 4/0 was my main grouper reel for years.  It had many wet trips offshore in my old 23' Dusky.  It was a heck of a sturdy tub, but underpowered with no trim tabs, it was a wet ride.  That is still my go to reel on the rare occasions I go grouper fishing.

I bought a 9/0 Sealine for shark fishing when I was a late teen.  It held somewhere around 630 yards of 80 lb test Dacron.  I'd hate to pay to fill that thing with the newer braids-it still has Dacron.  I nearly got pulled out of the boat while holding onto to that rod and reel while fishing for Jewfish (Goliath Grouper these days).  We were using whole 25-30 lb amberjacks for bait on two 16/0 hooks attached to a doubled up 60', 150 lb test mono leader (Bimini Twist).  I got skidded across the deck, the rod slammed on the transom and my feet were dangling as I was sitting on the rod butt trying to avoid going over.  Thankfully, the line parted.  We were fishing 54' of water so I wanted several wraps of leader on the spool.  I got several up to within 10' of the boat that day but never landed any.  Most of these beasts were likely 4-500 lbs.  I felt like I lost a bad fight or survived a terrible wreck the next day-what fun it was.  The fish were all on a shrimp boat wreck, so the big groupers had a structural advantage.  

Rob, I'd like to see you casting that Italian rod in the surf and the fish you trick.  Y'all are going to have me not able to sleep tonight and not wanting to do my saw jobs or my bass fishing gig with all of this offshore/saltwater talk.  The game has certainly changed a lot since I used to go offshore frequently.  I hope that when I get back out there that my old school tactics and tackle will still fool a few.

[YellowHammer]

Oh wow, that brings back memories.  My very first "real" reel, i saved up my last penny as a kid, was a beautiful Millionaire 5H bait casting reel in root beer brown.  I only had two lures back then, made money mowing lawns, a black Lunker Lure buzz bait, and a pack of Manns Purple Jellyworms.  I loved that reel, but I eventually wore the gears into toothless disks, and they just gave up the ghost.  Slagged it out, but I couldn't tell you how many thousands of miles it buzzed a buzz bait.  I had it paired with a home built Fenwick Lunker Stik I built from a kit from Netcraft, with a Bill Dance style pistol grip handle and everything.  I used Mom's clear fingernail polish to coat the rod wraps when they would crack.

That reel, at the time, was state of the art.  I used it both freshwater and salt water fishing, it was all I had. 

I haven't done any real Goliath fishing, i knew of a wreck in Destin that had one as a resident as my Scuba club buddies would tell me, and I would hook it occasionally, but although I routinely landed sharks and other decent sized creatures, when I hooked "Bubba" it was always over pretty quick.  He would always beat me.

One time I was so sure I would catch him I had my brother at the helm and told him when I got the hit, to put the boat into gear and drive off, pulling Bubba away from the wreck.  I got a hit, my bother throttled up and a minutes of grunting and holding onto the rod for dear life, a durn amberjack got towed up and started skipping on the surface!  Oops, good plan but wrong fish.

Without doubt, the biggest problem I have with saltwater fishing is making the transition back to freshwater, catching the smaller fish.

I have a Penn Spinfsher 6500, it was built when Penn still built good reels, but it maxes out at 30 lbs drag, and it is about twice the size and a third more weight than the 40 lb drag Penn Authority I replaced it with. As a matter of fact, this was the very first year it didn't make the trip.  It was kind of sad, it still runs perfect.