So now that ICAST 2011 is over and the dust has settled, what did we take away from all that we’ve seen? A few things stand out in my mind.
The first being, it wasn’t all that long ago when the idea of having a premium casting reel weighing less than 7 ounces, at a reasonable price was nothing more than a wish or a rumor. Add all the new offerings that will soon be available and it is now a reality. Not only that but the choices of gear ratio, right or left hand retrieve and line capacities has never been greater. There will be no reason to settle for anything considering all the options that will soon be on store shelves everywhere.
To go along with your new, ultra-lightweight reel, you are soon going to have a myriad of rod options for whatever technique you wish that will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 ounces. That’s going to bring the total weight of your combo to somewhere under 11 ounces. This was unimaginable no more than a very few years ago. To top it all off, this new equipment is going to be more sensitive for the angler and more responsive to the angler than in any prior season. Man, has fishing gear come a long way in a short time or what?
And this year, we are starting to see spinning reels that are just over the 7 ounce threshold. Once again, it was a very, very few years ago when manufacturers were content to produce a 30 series spinning reel that weighed somewhere around 11 ounces and call it good. I don’t make a habit of prognostication, but, if I had to take a shot in the dark as far as next year goes, my guess is that while today we have a handful of these reels to choose from, by next year’s ICAST, the floodgates are gonna open and every manufacturer will have a 30 series spinning reel that will weight less than 8 ounces.
To complement that, the line choices that are out there now fit any situation you might run into. We’ve got braid, co-polymers, fluorocarbon, mono-filament, combinations of two or more materials and then some! Low-stretch, high-stretch, limp, rigid, clear, colored and more. It ain’t like it use to was, that’s for sure!
We will soon have diminutive little baits that are going to run deeper than we ever thought possible with patterns that will mimic just about every kind of baitfish found anywhere. All we have to do as anglers is know what the primary forage is for the lakes that we frequent and we should be able to get something off the shelf that will fit our needs.
Proven products are being tweaked to add more tools to the anglers arsenal so that we can be more specific and varied in our presentations.
Yeah, it’s gonna be a good year! We already have our eyes on a whole bunch of new products that we’ll be testing as soon as we can get out hands on them.