Fishing - Casting a Bait Casting Reel

Hi! I'm captain Steve Chaconas with National Bass Guide Service. Today we are going to talk about how to cast a baitcasting reel. We have already shown you the key components, and they are very important, the parts of a baicasting reel and learning how to cast one. Again, this is going to revolve around your thumb; being able to control the speed of the spool with your thumb. When you hit the button on the spool, it releases the spool, and the spool rotates and you reel it up and do it again, but again, push the button, that releases the spool; let your thumb barely touch that spool to control the speed of that spool, and educate your thumb as to what it feels like to have that spool revolving past your thumb - and slowing it down, stopping it, slowing it down and stopping it till you really educate that thumb, and it may become second nature. Otherwise, if this thing goes uncontrolled, you end up with a backlash with line that gets all looped up and nerved like that then you have to learn how to get rid of those. And hopefully, I don't have to show you that because that could get kind of complicated. What I want you to do is, I want you to hold the rod out horizontally from your body, bring the bait up to the tip of the rod, push the button, and slowly allow that spool to let the line out by controlling the speed of that spool with your thumb.

So again, do this several times until you learn what that line feels like going through your thumb; retrieve it back up, start it again and just let that bait drop all the way to the bottom, but feel that spool and that line rotating through your thumb. Once we do that, we are going to go to the next step where we are going to have the rod back here, we are going to push the button, and we are just going to lob it; just try to lob it up, just allow that line to pull through your thumb. We are now looking to make a cast; we just want to educate our thumb, so we learn how that feels, so we can control the speed of the spool. And eventually, we are going to make longer casts, but everything is a lob; we are just lobbing it straight up, trying to get this thing a little further away to educate our thumb, to feel what that thumb feels like with that spool revolving underneath our thumb.

Once we get the hang of it, we are going to make a cast thats basically off our shoulder; we are going to make a cast off our shoulder a little bit further. Start to get the feel of what this feels like, and eventually, once you get the hang of doing this, we are going to let the rod load up behind us and use that rod, and to cast that bait forward. Aim at your target, point your rod where you are going, and you won't have any problems. Coming up next, we will show you another technique of casting a baitcaster, and that's a technique that's called pitching, that's for closed end fishing, that's coming up next.