By John Merwin

There are times when I feel like the dumbest angler to ever wet a line. Like the time I anxiously threaded a dry fly on my tippet during a heavy hatch and started casting while forgetting completely to actually tie a knot. So where’d my fly go? Duh!

The worst, though, is all the years I’ve wrestled with that little tab on most spinning-reel spools that’s designed to hold the line end in storage. The tab is recessed in the spool’s side and hard to reach. For the longest time I struggled with both hands to get the line into the recess and under the tab where it clearly belonged. Never have I seen any directions as to actually how this is to be done.

By Joe Cermele

We've seen a bunch of old Pflueger reels in our ongoing vintage tackle contest, but the one below submitted by Jeff Reiten is the most impressive of them all simply because the condition is so stellar. It looks as if he just plucked it from the case in a country general store. Jeff wrote:

Here is a photo of my grandfather's reel. It is a PFLUEGER SUMMIT NO. 1993-l. All papers and tags are there, plus the Comfo Ring. I have no info on the reel as he has passed away. Any info would be great as this seems a neat old reel, which is new in the box.

By John Merwin

As a cold wet spring slips into what I hope will be a long, hot summer, largemouth bass get more of my attention. With just a few backcountry exceptions, the lakes I fish locally are heavily pressured. The bass have long ago wised up. They are wary, picky, and hard to catch.

That can make tackle and lure choices difficult. Do I go with the flow, using traditional lures and tactics, even though I know that the bass have seen the same things hundreds of times? Or do I try something purposefully different, hoping that novelty will attract more and larger fish?

Those aren’t simple questions. Depending on which local water body I’m fishing, I see most people either throwing a white spinnerbait with silver blades or else pitching heavily weighted soft-plastic creature baits around thick mats of weeds. These are for the most part good fishermen doing what’s been proven to work over time. And they catch fish--sometimes.

By Joe Cermele

We've been posting a bunch of lures lately in our ongoing vintage tackle contest, so I thought it was time for a change-up. I dug through the entries and found this book, submitted by Jeff Kreager (a.k.a Buckhunter). I'm a bit of a book collector myself, though I had never seen this title. Jeff also gets brownie points for the mug and glasses...nice touch. Jeff wrote:

I have been collecting old books about fishing for years. I picked up this little gem at an auction as part of a larger lot of old books several years ago. It is a 1923 edition of a Samuel G. Camp classic. By no means an expensive item but add a cup of coffee on a cold winters day and it will take you back 100 years