The Day I Finally Gave a Baitcasting Reel a Fair Shot

I bought a baitcasting reel this past summer for one reason. The old one quit. It was a cheap thing I had picked up used, and the level wind gave out in the second week of June while I was throwing a worm at a dock on Lake Norman. Line piled up on one side of the spool and that was the end of it. I finished the morning with a spinning rod and drove home annoyed.

I had been a spinning reel man for most of my life. Denise will tell you I form opinions slowly and keep them a long time, and baitcasters were one of them. I had owned two over the years. Both were secondhand. Both spent more time in my lap being picked at than in the water being fished. So I decided the reel was the problem. I was partly right about that and partly wrong, which is the way it usually goes.

What I bought to replace it was a Piscifun Torrent, right-hand retrieve, 7.1:1 gear ratio. I picked that ratio because I throw soft plastics and spinnerbaits most of the time, and I wanted to pick up line quick when a bass runs at the boat. It weighs eight ounces, it carries six bearings, and it is rated for 18 pounds of drag. I mounted it on a 7-foot medium-heavy casting rod I already owned, so the reel was the only new thing in the boat that morning.

The first trip was humbling. I backlashed four times before I got a bait wet, and one of those took long enough that a pontoon boat went past me twice. The magnetic brake on the side plate is not decoration. I started with it set heavy, which cut my distance down to almost nothing, and then I backed it off a little at a time over the next few trips until the casts came out flat and clean. That took real time. I want to be honest about that part.

By the fourth trip I had stopped thinking about my thumb. That is the whole thing with a baitcaster, and anyone who tells you different is selling something. You learn to feel the spool slow down and you lay your thumb on it. The reel either helps you do that or it fights you. This one helped.

Set heavy, this is a boring, safe reel that will not embarrass you. Backed off, it will teach you more about your thumb in one morning than a season of reading about it.

I caught my best bass of the summer on it in August, a little over four pounds, sitting under a dock on the north end. She ran twice and the drag gave line both times without chattering. Eighteen pounds of drag on a lake bass is more than you need, and I would rather have it and not need it. The drag adjusts easy enough with wet hands, which matters more than the number on the box.

I spooled it with 30-pound braid, which is what the reel is rated for at 120 yards, and that is plenty for anything I do on this lake. Braid does not stretch, so a backlash on braid buries itself deeper than mono will. That is one more reason to run the brake heavier than you think you need at the start.

There is a spinning reel in my truck for catfish below the Catawba dam and I have no plans to change that. A baitcaster is for casting and working a lure. Spinning gear is for sitting on a bucket with a chunk of bait and waiting. Different tools. I spent years trying to make one do the other one's job and it never worked.

Two things I do not love. It is not a long-cast reel for light lures. Below about three eighths of an ounce it gets fussy on me and I go back to the spinning rod. And it wants a rinse and a drop of oil more often than my spinning reels do if I want it to stay smooth through a summer of two and three mornings a week. That is the nature of the thing more than a knock on this reel.

Tyler, my grandson, is ten and fishes a push-button rod at the neighborhood pond on Saturdays. I am not handing him a baitcaster yet. He is still learning to watch a line and set a hook, and adding a spool that spins under his thumb would only make him miserable. When he can put a jig where he wants it with the rod he has, then we will talk. Five months in, the Piscifun has been in the boat on every trip since July, and that is the best thing I can say about a piece of gear.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are standing at the ramp with a bird's nest in your spool, I would tell you to go home and practice in the yard. Not the water. The yard, over grass, with a practice plug and no hook. Twenty minutes, three evenings, more brake than you think you need, then back it off a little at a time. That is the whole learning curve and it is not a long one, but nobody skips it. The Piscifun Torrent will not skip it for you. What it will do is sit there and behave while you learn, cast after cast, without asking anything of you that the rod and your thumb are not already doing. For what it costs, that is what I want out of a reel.