I mainly fish bailless or conventional now but when fishing a reel with a bail I’ll always close it by hand. I also make sure the line is lying on the spool correctly to avoid knots.
I manually close the bail on fresh and salt spinning reels.
It's just a force of habit I picked up from when I first started using braid on my surf setup to help prevent the creation of bird nests when the loose line on the spool would be pulled off during a cast.
From fishing at night I began to flip manually and make sure the line was on my roller and unfouled. Then I got a Van Staal, then I started hacking bails off of my other reels....
Don't trust bails - it'll cost you plugage.
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.
i flip manually and put the braid on the roller by hand and give it a pull to make sure all is good.
i like bails, they make it easier (for me anyway) to get the line on the roller when a fish is runnin with my eel in the dark, on a pitching boat with numb hands after 12 hrs of straight fishing.
I flip the bail manually...been removing the trips ever since I bought a reel from Niko that had that done. also helps stop the bail from flipping shut when I don't want it to. saves a few plugs from being cast off.
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