Every baitcaster gets a backlash once in while. Untangling the line can be a real pain, and many resort to a knife or scissors to cut away the tangle in frustration. No more. This quick video tip for clearing backlash snarls will help.

Reeling forward slightly while pressing on the tangled line with your thumb smooths the snarl and pushes those overlapping line loops free. It’s not a new idea. I first heard of this in an article by bass pro Shaw Grigsby maybe 10 years ago. But the video here by Maryland bass-blogger Kevin Scarselli is the first live demonstration I’ve seen.

Yes, it works. At least it works most of the time. The main thing in clearing a backlash by this or any other method is ... ... patience. If you get angry and frustrated and start yanking on the line willy-nilly, you’ll just be making things worse.

If things are so bad that you do have to resort to cutting the line to clear a tangle, then be careful of this one thing: Make sure after cutting the tangle free that the remaining line is not wound under itself on the spool. Sometimes the newly cleared line end gets tucked under a slack coil on the reel. If this happens--and it can be hard to notice--line won’t pay freely off the reel, and you might be creating another tangle worse than the one you had in the first place.

So how about the new biodegradable fishing lines and flyfishing-tippet materials? A little-known company called Bioline has for the past few years been marketing a corn-based polymer fishing line that is clear and that the company claims will biodegrade naturally within 5 years. This in contrast to common nylon monofilament that can persist in nature for as long as 600 years.

Wright-McGill has recently bought Bioline (or so I’ve been told) and is newly marketing the product as spools of flyfishing tippet. I guess they figure fly anglers will be most willing to pay a premium for an environmentally friendly fishing product. This is all so new that it doesn’t yet appear on Wright-McGill’s website. But when Bioline was selling 30-yard tippet spools, retail was about $10 each or roughly twice the cost of premium nylon.

So how does this stuff measure up? I obtained a size 4X sample tippet spool from some Wright-McGill reps at a recent trade show. The spool is labeled as .009-inch diameter and 6-pound test. On my own micrometer and line-testing machine, the 4X Bioline measured .011-inch and slightly more than 7-pound-test (dry).

A “normal” 4X nylon tippet will be .007-inch and approximately 6-pound-test. Flyfishing-tippet is ordinarily scaled and sold by diameter, not pound-test. That means all spools of 4X should measure .007-inch, regardless of brand or strength. Unfortunately, Wright-McGill is not following that industry-wide convention and appears to be scaling the Bioline tippet sizes by strength instead of diameter.

That quibble aside, the Bioline tippet does seem workable as a leader material. And unlike discarded or lost nylon--which is a substantial environmental hazard--it will biodegrade fairly quickly. (The makers say, by the way, that full strength is retained for 8 to 10 months.)

The fly in the ointment is price. Wright-McGill hasn’t posted prices that I’ve seen yet, but a 30-yard spool of Bioline tippet was retailing for about twice the price of nylon. So maybe the bottom-line question is this: How green is your wallet?

Do we really need camo-pattern fishing rods? I was wondering that this morning while noting that the “best new rod” category at the recent ICAST fishing-trade show was won by a new rod series decked out in a variety of camouflage finishes. It just struck me that making a rod less visible is going to make me more likely to step on it or to shut the rod tip in a car door.

A new rod company out of Texas called USA Custom Rods has produced a series of baitcasting and spinning rods in various camo finishes under license from Mossy Oak. You can choose Break Up, Duck Blind (pictured), or even hot-pink versions intended, I guess, for the ladies on board. The rods are listed at about $140 each.

I know that for many sportsmen, camo-pattern everything is almost a way of life. So there’s camo-pattern underwear, flashlights, cameras, socks and probably even toilet paper. All in addition to more normally camouflaged items such as jackets and hunting pants and waders. Some of this makes sense. Some of it doesn’t.

I suppose a camo-pattern fishing rod might be seen--or not seen, actually--as the ultimate in stealth angling. The rods were at least enough of a novel gimmick to pull lots of votes among ICAST attendees, hence the “best rod” award. But the whole idea still seems--to me, at least--more than a little over the top.

There’s been a lot of talk around here lately about budget-priced fishing gear, and even more discussion about how ostensibly silly it is to pay hundreds for simple things like reels. All this leads me to point out an interesting paradox when it comes to tackle and gear prices.

Simms waders are a good example. When that company first came out with their high-end G4 waders selling for as much as $700 a pair, there was great hue and cry all over the Internet about how outrageous the price seemed. The very idea. $700 for a pair of stupid waders. Why I can buy a pair of waders for less than a hundred bucks! That’s ridiculous. And on and on.

At the same time, those waders were (and are) selling extremely well. There was, of course, no big-noise equivalent from the people who were buying them. They were just buying a very good product, albeit expensive, because they could afford it.

Sure, you can buy less expensive waders. Or cheaper reels, rods, lines or whatever. They will work okay for a while, but probably won’t last as long, work quite as well, be as personally satisfying, or be as comfortable. And it’s also worth noting that Simms has various other wader models that cost a good deal less.

The other day I described a $39 fly reel that drew lots of favorable comment. Yes, I do enjoy fishing with that reel (mostly because I enjoy fishing) but I don’t lust after one. What I really want is a Tibor Everglades fly reel for bonefishing. It’s only about $640. It’s a lovely, well-made, lifetime fly reel. Right now, I can’t afford it. But someday....