Reel Repair by Alan Tani

I will say , when you bring fish up slow they generally do not get the bends .
    When they do ,I send them down 1/3 the depth that we are fishing and hold them there.
    you will feel them start reviving and swim off .  If they don`t swim strong go half way down .    I like to use the wire descender fish will swim down and self release 

   I know ,there is a lot of members of the pig tail club .

So I unspooled and respooled the reel in question. Knot sat about a quarter inch from the spool arbor. When I tried to cinch it down to see if I could skip retying it pulled through instead.

Never trust another man's knot. Never. Lesson learned. It's like I wanna give people the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes I wanna stop.

Any time you catch a fish it's a good day!   

I'm going to be quite controversial and say that I strongly suspect they take fish that have suffered significant barotrauma and send them off to die where we can't see it, instead of them floating off on the surface. Once barotrauma has occurred, the damage is done, you're not fixing that fish by sending it down to the bottom, you're just letting the pressure squash all the ruined organs back inside them.

The only study I could find states (emphasis mine):
Initial post-release mortality (defined as all mortality events observable from the vessel while fishing) across all devices was relatively low (7.5%) in capture depths less than 100 m, but increased significantly to 16.4% at capture depths from 100 to 135 m.

So beyond 100m depth, 16.4% of released fish died in such a way that it was observable from the vessel that they had died, how many more died a couple of hours later, or sank to the bottom, or drifted off a little before surfacing?

If you've caught your limit of a species affected by barotrauma, move on and fish for something else. You're probably still killing fish, but you get to feel better about it because you sent them to the bottom first.

          Well after reading the posts and uni knot is mention , tried another version of the 4 turn under arbor .     See you got me thinking again . Instead of tying a Rapala knot , I tied a uni knot.
      What I like about the uni knot is once the knot is sh-inched up the 4 turns are always locked up .  Another note is when you try to pull it backwards ,I am about 12-15 pounds pull to get it to slip . Pull it forward no slip .

Fishing is fishing, looks like a lot of fun

Quote from: oldmanjoe on Today at 01:17:17 AMI respect your knowledge , so I assume that you start with Dacron with back to back clove hitches , then tie into braid with the uni knot .
    Dacron does hold ,I can not get it to slip by hand pull .  Braid on the other hand, side by side test fails .

Both dacron and spectra.   

The Penn 85 I saw blow up was used by me on a sunny 68* day for trolling on the Sacramento River. Overnight it dipped to frost level.  When we go into the boat in the morning to fish again the spool was toast.  The Jigmaster and J.A. Coxe were in for a service because the reel wouldn't crank.  Bill

    Before you start signing autographs  Think of braid knots as 1-9292327464