Out fishing

I fish. Quite a lot some say. Using a rod and a spinning reel.
Mainly in the sea, standing on a stone or the bare mountain.

OK, so you have a father who brought you up in his fishing boat, taking you out every other day to drag 150kg's of cod out of the ocean just to pull out all it's guts.

You don't do what your parents tell you to, you do something very similar.

My gear consist of one 8' rod and one spinning reel. Both are somewhat alround, the rod 8' and the reel in the 3500 size. I wish I had a few more of both, but they cost money and need care. So I'll wait until I move somewhere with even more variety in fishing sites.

Rod

The Ron Thompson Steelhead Spin 8' (10-30g) is a Graphite (IM6 stiffness) rod, my first at that. When you've been finshing only with cheap glass-fiber rods for years, using a Carbon is like a dream. It is very light, very responsive, and has moderate stiffness/power, casting quite long for an 8'.

Reel

The Daiwa Sweepfire 3550 is a cheap spinning reel with good quality. It has only one ball- bearing, but is well crafted so it doesn't feel cheap or jiggy in any way. Quite smooth drag despite it's rear mounted dragwashers. The lineroller easily gets stuck, so I lubricate it and other moving parts after each trip.

I currently have 110 meters of Berkley Fireline 0.25mm (17.5kg), and some Plastil Suverän 0.35mm(11.2kg) on this reel (No prize for guessing who's on top). The plastil isn't nearly as flexible or durable as the Siglon V 0.33mm line I used to have but it will do. The Fireline does the heavy lifting anyway.

Lures

Then there's the lure part. Cause I fish with lures, not flies. Lures are funny. I never get my mead around lures in general. I have come to some conclusions though;

• Fish will bite only if it wants to.
• Use a lure you know.
  • If you don't know your lure, get to know it. Throw it a few meters out, 45 degrees on the sun so you can see it working. Does it look like a creature when you pull it in? No? Try pulling it in faster. Or slower. Try a jagged drag. Experiment. If you're so lucky that a fish follows your lure in, play with the fish to see how it reacts to different movements. It's all about learning.
• Don't use too heavy lures.
• Don't use too light lures.
• Colors:
  • Cod seems to like red and green colors very much. Green colors normally penetrate deeper inshore, while blue colors penetrate deeper out in the open ocean due to different types of algae.
  • Many fish like yellow, white, blue, mint green and citrus orange.
  • There is some argument about whether ot not to use colors that match the surroundings. I'm sure some fish will only eat certain types of fish with certain colors. If these two fish live together it is likely that the prey is colored according to the surroundings. However, there is a reason fish are colored the way they are, namely evolution. Evolution in this case means that fish that stand out of the surroundings are more visible and more easily eaten. Dead fish cant reproduce but the one that wasn't visible can. Therefore you can argue that colors that stand out of the surroundings are best. As you can see above this is exactly what I have experienced. If you fish on the white beach, dark colors seem good, while fishing where there is dark rocks, light colors would be better.
• Under normal conditions, it's better to fish using a spoon.

Other things I've learned:

• Fishing is about fishing, not eating.