Fishing tip number two
Although I have thousands of hours of freshwater fishing experience, I probably have more hours of saltwater fishing, and I know for a fact that few freshwater fish are large enough to require the 100% knot or spool you. So this is for saltwater fishermen fishing for forty pounders and up.
On any long-range fishing boat going out for days, you see all the fishermen setting or testing their drags by simply puling on the line.
The have no idea of how many pounds they are pulling. To set your drag washers properly, do one third of the pound test line, or leader.
Do this with a fish scale pulling against your line coming off the reel. If your reel has one inch of line outward from the center of the spool,
when a fish runs out hard and pulls line out two thirds of the way, this automatically increases the tension by triple. Now you are pulling at the line's test.
Your temptation is always to tighten the drags, but they have already been tightened by the smaller lever from center of spool to outer diameter of line. I set my 40-pound test line to 13 pounds and brought in a sixty-pound yellowtail after two very long runs out and a trip two thirds of the way around a 110 foot boat. It was the biggest fish caught on the trip by a factor of three. I would have lost it had I not set the drags at 1/3 of test and left it there.
Big sardine live bait, tail hooked to run out to the kelp paddy we stopped on, first bait in the water. If the bait does not run out strongly, bring it back and try another.
