The regular late winter/early spring showers are back for a few days, but the weather overall continues to be very mild for this time of year. You won’t hear this very often from someone who lives in the PacNW in March, but we could use the rain. The water levels of rivers and lakes around here are very low and there isn’t much of a snowpack this year. As of today, we only have 7% of our usual average snowpack. That is not good news because water has to come from somewhere, and around here, when it’s not raining, it comes from melted snow.
Anyway, the mild late winter weather is making us think that it’s going to be an early start to the fishing season, so we are starting to get the fishing gear ready to go. A good way to spend a rainy day indoors is to clean up all those fishing reels. I’m not a believer in expensive fishing gear, I try to get good fishing tackle at a reasonable price. The thing with less expensive fishing reels is that you have to do regular maintenance on them to keep them working smoothly. The fishing tackle used for kayak fishing tends to get banged around and dunked in the water a bit more frequently, so at least once a year, I take the fishing reels apart, clean them up and re-lube them with waterproof silicone grease. That’s enough to keep them working smoothly for an entire season of fishing.
First up are the reels we use for smallmouth bass and trout; a few light spinning reels and a baitcaster or two. Taking care of fishing reels is pretty straightforward and easy to do. All you do is take them apart, making sure you pay attention to how the parts fit so you can put it back together, clean them with alcohol so you don’t damage plastic parts, re-grease them(I use Slickoleum, a lightweight, waterproof, silicone grease) and put them back together. If you do it correctly, you shouldn’t have any parts left over and the reel will work just as good as when it was new.
In a week or so, we’ll be getting the kayak out of the garage and checking it out to make sure it is ready to go. We have to fix a crack on the deck and a few scratches on the hull along with the usual pre-season kayak checkup, so stay tuned for that.
Work is still continuing on the watermanatwork.com mobile website. We have a lot of it done but it’s a time consuming process, but it won’t be long before the website will work flawlessly on any digital device.