How To Choose A Fly Fishing Reel

Hi, I'm Gavin Hodgson, fly fishing instructor and manager of Grangers Fishing Tackle here in South Kensington, London. We're going to talk you through some of the techniques and tips and help you get started in fishing. So after choosing a fly rod, the next best thing and the next most important thing is a fly reel.

Obviously, the lane size will be needing to be considered but also, we've got the other thing to think about which is saltwater or freshwater, and that's very important in reel choice. I have a few fly lines to show here. Reel size is, we're looking at the little dingly 3 width reel which is a nice little hottie.

You can see the size of the fly line there. It's quite thin. It's not going to take up too much room on the reel, and in this situation, a whole new bucking will be more than enough.

So, that size is all we really need. It's not too heavy, it's not going to overload the rod, it's going to be quite nice on a short little dream rod. This is a weight for 7, a weight for profile lane.

It's a lane that we need to get a little bigger reel size. It also has a twin color which is very useful and that basically gives us an idea of where the head of the lane is, the weight of the lane and helps us to lift off the water. But when we choose a reel fly lane, obviously, the little guy isn't going to be helping us much, so we need to go for something a little larger.

As you can see, capacity-wise, this has a much larger capacity we can get, a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards a bucking plus the fly line, and that will be enough to do the job on a width of 7 rod. When we step up to things like the saltwater rods again, obviously, the drag system is going to be important on this one because we need to make sure that we're ready for the elements. So, saltwater reels, either of these have good saltwater drag systems, very strong, very powerful, but they're all of huge capacity so we can this fly line which is the width for a 12.

As you can see, the difference in size between the fly lines, it's massive. It takes a lot of room on the reel. We also need to think about what bucking length we need on there, or a reel for this sort of job, we need 200 or even more yards of bucking.

So, considering the size of the flies, the fly line, the reels and the rod, everything puts course together to make a balanced rod frame. .