How to Set Up a Fishing Pole for Bass Fishing

Video Transcript

"When you're setting up a bass fishing setup, especially a spinning setup like this, I like to choose like a nice 6, 6 and a half foot medium action spinning rod with a nice little medium size reel like this. You don't want to overpower your bass setup, you want to give them a fighting chance to keep the sport in it. At the same time, you don't want to go too light and lose a trophy fish. As far as line goes, if you're using monofilament like a 10 to 12 pound test line would be good unless you're fishing in heavy weed cover where you might want to upgrade to like a 20 pound test line. A lot of times with bass fishing too, I like to setup an ultralight setup like this especially in the northeast here where a lot of the bass are in the 1 to 3 pound class, it'll give you a lot of sport and action on a small rod. Now putting line on the bait casing reel can be as simple as just taking off your reel, going down to the local bait shop and they'll put it on for you professionally with a machine. That's always your best option and it normally only costs a few dollars. But if you're not in a position where you can get to the bait shop, it's easy enough to do it yourself. Just typically what I'll do is run the line down the first guide. Now with a bait casting reel, what's important is that the first thing you do is thread the line through the line guide then you want it to go under the spool, grab it with your little finger, pull it out and then you just got to grab the loop on the other side of the spool. When you got both of these ends, all you want to do is just tie a simple little slipknot, just do 3 wraps then go through the loop and then through the other loop. Bring that down on the reel. If there's too long of a tag, just snip it off with scissors and then all you want to do next is just hold the line between your thumb and your first finger and just wind slowly. The line guide will guide the line on there how it should be done, you just don't want to go too fast because if you go too fast, it'll spool on there inconsistently."