What is baitfiness?
Baitfiness fishing is lure fishing with a lightweight casting package. A casting reel is a spinning reel. It is the rotation of the spool that allows you to cast or retrieve the lure. It is not the same principle as a spinning reel where it is the rotor that will wind the line around the spool.
Often associated with heavy and powerful fishing for black bass and pike, there are now very powerful reels for fishing with very light lures.
It takes a top of the line reel and a lot of work to cast lures weighing as little as two grams. Indeed, it is the lure that drives the spool and that will allow to unwind the wire that separates the lure from the reel. And we can imagine that the lighter the lure is, the less easy it is to drive the spool.
A practice that comes to us from Japan
Baitfiness was originally a practice for light black bass stalking. With the advent of philosophies such as downsizing (reducing the size of lures to limit stimuli and appear more natural to wary fish), baitfiness has found a place of choice in Japan.
Japanese fishermen who face very wary fish wanted to combine very light and subtle lure fishing with the advantages of baitcasting. This has also been possible with technical and technological developments such as the use of composite materials, the performance of bearings or developments in the mastery of the use of different metals (light and strong alloys).
From bass to trout, there is only one step that the Japanese, again, have taken. Here again, the goal is to take advantage of the benefits of baitcasting to track salmonids in rivers.
Baitfiness and salmonids
Very popular in Japan, baitfiness is struggling to make a place for itself in France. It is however a relevant practice which generates a lot of sensations and pleasure.
Unfortunately, it is also a type of fishing that requires a high-end reel, even if there are more and more accessible models for the general public. It is also a technically demanding fishery that requires a lot of practice for maximum results.
In the next few articles, we will detail the equipment, the relevant techniques and the good practices of baitfiness to fish for salmonids.
