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I’ve seen the question come up on more than one occasion. “How much backing should my reel hold?” Or “does so and so reel hold enough backing?” My question is how many times have you actually seen your backing while catching a fish, targeting the correct species (i.e. catching a redfish on a 3wt, and you’ll probably see backing more times then not), or a time you ran into something with the wrong gear. Pelagics and tarpon excluded, unless it’s a killer story. With that being said I would love to hear some stories.
I’ll start by saying the first time I saw my fly line backing. I was fishing some docklights for snook in ft pierce in January. The snook were feeding but only on tiny tiny things. I had luck throwing a sz 8 crazy Charlie that night. I was casting at one particular light and slowly stripping my line through when a big ray swam through the light. Seeing this I started stripping my line frantically trying to get it out of the way, but unfortunately the ray swam right into my line and got hooked. It took off like a bat out of hell and to this day I’ve never seen my hatch spin so fast. I was using a fairly heavy tippet and couldn’t break the line, so I ended up losing all my fly line and about 2/3 of my backing.
I’ll start by saying the first time I saw my fly line backing. I was fishing some docklights for snook in ft pierce in January. The snook were feeding but only on tiny tiny things. I had luck throwing a sz 8 crazy Charlie that night. I was casting at one particular light and slowly stripping my line through when a big ray swam through the light. Seeing this I started stripping my line frantically trying to get it out of the way, but unfortunately the ray swam right into my line and got hooked. It took off like a bat out of hell and to this day I’ve never seen my hatch spin so fast. I was using a fairly heavy tippet and couldn’t break the line, so I ended up losing all my fly line and about 2/3 of my backing.