Category: freshwater fishing rod and reel

Posted on

What Freshwater Fishing Rod Do You Use?

Wow! It’s been quite a while since I’ve made a post. So lets get right to it.

I was reading about a new fishing rod made by “Element 21” that actually uses some bio-technology to add carrot fibers into the rod creation process! Can you believe that? Very cool.

I’ve used my good ole trusty Garcia Mitchell for about forty years and it hasn’t ever failed me. It was top of the line and is a lite-ultralite rod. It makes it very easy casting the light lures I like to use and I’ve landed some nice 5-6 lb fish on it.

But after reading about these new “Carrot Stix” fishing rods, I’m tempted to buy one and check them out. So I was wondering if any of my readers have any experience with these new rods? If you do, please post a comment here and let me know how you like it? I would really appreciate it!

If you’ve never heard of these rods (like me, before today) you can check them out at their site. Just click on the link below:

Carrot Stix Fishing Rods

From what I’ve read, they just signed a distribution agreement with “Dick’s Sporting Goods” so they should be fairly easy to find in the very near future!

So come on guys/gals and share your experiences with these new and interesting rods please.

Catch you later.

Posted on

Fresh Water Fishing Spring Reel Cleaning

Taking a break from taxes, I thought I’d share some knowledge I learned last weekend. We went fishing (my sons and I) last weekend and I brought my reel out from the garage. It was hard to crank and I wondered what it was that was causing this. We were short on time so I went with the reel the way it was and had a nice few hours.

After coming home, I pulled the reel off of my rod and started to disassemble it. It was then that I remembered that the last time I had cleaned the reel, I ran out of my good ole Garcia-Mitchell grease that I’d had for years! Wanting to go fishing the next day, I used some lithium grease that I had out in the garage. BIG mistake! The grease had become very stiff and had turned some of the inner reel parts a greenish color – not what I wanted to see!

So I took the reel completely apart – including removing the ball bearings from the reel spindle shaft. Did you know that there are 17 ball bearings on each side of the shaft. (That makes 34 ball bearings total.) And these ball bearings are just a tad bit bigger than a pin head! Fortunately I had bought some Southbend reel grease over the winter and used that to clean and lubricate everything – and I mean everything! After putting it all back together, it works much more smoothly and fluently.

So take a lesson from me – always use quality reel grease when cleaning and lubricating your freshwater fishing reel!

Want to see the quality grease I used? Here it is:

Catch you later!