levelwind-non levelwind distance !

[Mike P]

Hey, Bill, stirring the pot again? Someone has to do it, all these group hugs get boring after awhile<img src="http://striped-bass.com/Images/Happy.gif" border="0" align="middle">. Now, I have to add my 2 cents.

First, on the how do you set up at 150 yards deal, simple answer--you don't. You can't, there's too much stretch in mono. To prove the point, step off 100 yards on the beach, and tie off a bank sinker on the line. Have a buddy hold the sinker at 100 yards from you, and take your best shot at yanking it out of his hand. Odds are, you can't do it. So, at anything over 100 yards, either the fish hooks itself or you lose it, plain and simple. The bait guys down south, who have to put their baits out those distances (either by casting or by kayak) use sharp, thin wire hooks, mainly circle hooks, to up the odds of a solid hook-up. I've hooked fish at the end of my cast, both in the Canal and off the beach--a good half come off, and I carry a file in my pocket and keep the hooks as sharp as I can. I've never hooked a fish at 150 yards because I can't cast that far, at least not with anything that's going to catch a fish. 450 feet is a long way to throw any plug, and I doubt many people can actualy do it. A torpedo sinker is one thing, a lure is another. Maybe a 4 oz diamond jig will fly that far, but few plugs will. I read posts on the internet all the time of guys claiming to throw 1 oz bucktails with pork over 100 yards and I laugh. The 100 yard cast in fishing is like the 300 yard drive in golf--many people say they can do it, few can. I fish the Canal a lot, have for over 30 years. Its width is a known fact, it's betwen 550 to 600 feet between the two bridges--the distance between the abutments of the Sagamore is exactly 544 feet and both are dry at low tide. If you can cast 100 yards, you should be able to pass the middle and reach breaking fish there--everyone who fishes the Ditch claims to be able to throw over 100, and very few of them manage to hit those fish breaking in the middle. I've seen guys opposite each other throw at the same fish and neither plug got within 40' of the fish. If guys routinely threw over 100, you'd see guys fishing across from each other tangle all the time, a 600' tug of war--in 30+ years of fishing the place, I've never seen it happen, not even once. Judging distance over water is a very difficult thing to do for many people.

As to the original issue of level-wind versus non-level wind, the gain in distance for the lure fisherman isn't worth the trade-off in convenience--you're talking 10 yards added distance at best, and as Saltheart already mentioned, many times, you will actually throw a level wind farther because if you retrieve line unevenly, you'll have to thumb more on the next cast when it fluffs. I grew up doing it the hard way, Penn Squidder, with nylon squidding line. When the Abu 7000 first appeared on the Cape, the old-timers hooted at it, they said one or two grains of sand in the level-wind gear and you'd throw it away in disgust. They turned out to be wrong. I can fish plugs and eels at night without a level wind--but, why should I? With swimmers and eels, I lose nothing in distance, I lose nothing in reliability, and I have one less thing to concentrate on--I can concentrate 100% on working the plug, not 95% on that and 5% on leveling the line. Even throwing poppers in the Ditch, in daylight, why sweat leveling the line just to get another 10 yards on the cast so you can try to reach a fish you only have a 50/50 shot of hooking and landing?

Bill, I have to say, in many of the places I've fished, I see guys using the old Squidder and the Newells and Daiwa SLOSHs without level-winds, for plugging and jigging. I still like a reel without one for jigging, I find it's easier to keep the line level on a narrow reel like a 6500CT, or a Penn 525, than on a wide one like a Squidder or a Newell 235. The shorter your thumb travels, the less likely you are to pile up peaks and valleys.