To be honest with you, with my heart beating a mile a minute I don't know if I would have the courage to freespool my line. I just made sure that I was using med to med-light pressure on the line and kept the pole stationary. When the bass worked it's way out I really let up on the pressure to the point where I could feel the fish trying to swim away with short bursts. It was at that point that the bass worked it's way free.

As for the book, there is a lot of information in this book that I felt I skimmed over too fast. Currently I'm about 200 pages into the book and I found it was very helpful to read this book much slower and reread a few sections after going out fishing. In the first chapter, Bill points out that, "the single most important element in making catches of big bass from heavily-fished waters is ATTENTION TO DETAIL" and I firmly believe this now. I think you'll thoroughly enjoy this book.

BTW, side note. I noticed a cool new feature after the message board software upgrade. When you attach pictures to a post they are now automatically visible. Very cool, no more html tags are needed to make the pic viewable for the post.

Vince
vince@theblankslate.com