Fly Fishing Backings

Video Transcript

Another part of your fly fishing equipment that a lot of people don't think about is the backing. The backing is what goes on before you put the fly line on, so here's the back end of my fly line and here's the backing. That's usually buried down inside your reel somewhere. The backing serves several purposes. One is your fly line is going to be somewhere between eighty and a hundred feet long. If you happen to hook a fish that pulls out those eighty feet of fly line, you usually will have on your reel, a hundred yards or more of backing, so the backing comes into play if you hook a big fish. Now, the other thing the backing does is it increases the diameter of the arbor of the reel. Since most of our fly reels are single action, that means you turn the handle around once, the spool goes around once. The backing increases the diameter of the arbor in the center. So, that allows you to pick up the line just a little bit quicker by having a larger diameter center on that reel. The other thing it does is, by increasing the diameter of the center of the reel, the arbor of the reel, it allows your fly line to be wrapped around something that's a little larger diameter. The fly line, because it has that plastic coating, has what we call memory, so it tends to want to stay coiled, so if you wrap it around the center of the reel, which is a pretty small diameter without the backing, then your line will come off looking like an old fashioned telephone cord with lots of kinks and curls in it, so the backing adds some distance if you hook a big fish, but it also increases that diameter so that you pick up your line a little bit faster and it also keeps your fly line from being wrapped tightly around the center of the reel.

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