Reviewed by: CAPT. MIKE SCHOONVELD

Most anglers know they need to change their line on a regular basis and most fishermen know quality fishing line is expensive. The two things that can help cut those costs is to purchase line in bulk spools instead of reel-filler amounts and don’t remove all the line on each reel every time it’s time to swap it out. 

 Few anglers use all the line spooled on a reel. If that happens you probably need a bigger reel. That line at the bottom of the spool may not be as good as new, but since it is never subjected to the subtle degradation by UV light and it’s never brutalized by being stretched, cast and other normal wear and tear of just being used, why change it?

 If you buy a bulk spool, how do you know when you have removed enough line? If you buy a 300 yard spool and you want to split it between two or three reels, how do you split it equally? The only way to do it with precision is to measure the line. There are tools to do this.

 One of the tools is not a line-counter reel. LC reels only measure the number of revolutions the reel’s spool makes and the changing numbers on counter are approximations – at best! A revolution of a half empty spool will only hold a small amount of line compared to a nearly full spool.

 One of the tools that will accurately measure the line spooling on or peeling off a reel is KastKing’s Kalibrate Line Spooler. (It’s designed to measure line being spooled on, but can easily be reversed to measure outgoing line.)  There are a lot of moving parts on this tool allowing it to be used for spooling with both spinning reels as well as revolving spool reels and on rods from heavy trolling to light carbon-fiber models – but it’s not complicated.

There are lots of line spooling tools available. Before I got the Kalibrate, I normally used a screwdriver punched through the arbor of a spool of line and clamped between my knees. There are a few line-counter tools that clamp onto a rod as well but the ones I’ve tried ranged from horrible to barely okay at best, for both ease of use and accuracy. The Kalibrate is the only model I’ve found that does both things and does both of them well.

The KastKing Kalibrate Tool is available at www.amazon.com or visit http://www.KastKing.com to see this tool and other KastKing products.