BFS Rabbit Hole

[Bigbox99]

On 1/31/2025 at 12:02 PM, Bass Rutten said:

One of the biggest fallacies around bfs is that it is just ultralight fishing with baitcasters. There’s no industry standard for rods or lures that defines them as bfs, people just be making up their own definitions. Rod and lure are chosen for your target species/application not by some arbitrary weight range or rod power (within reason obviously). Many bfs spools are rated to 15 grams and more. Another myth being that bfs is trying to replace spinning gear. They have different purposes, (bass) bfs was designed specifically for accuracy, stealth, and power in pressured tight quarter fishing scenarios.

 

Some real advantages over spinning gear of a casting reel with lighter spool/bearings and line are improvements in ease of casting, lure control, accuracy, sensitivity, line management, and very stealthy lure entries. Also, a nice side benefit is being able to spool up with straight 8 or 10lb fluoro line, try that on your spinning reel! A few disadvantages are a bit of a learning curve, and deep water applications. If that sounds good to you then yes it's worth diving into the rabbit hole.

This is the correct answer.  People have been using baitcast reels since forever to cast light weight baits.  The term BFS didn't enter the bass fishing world lexicon until the 2010s when these types of bass rods that could cast tiny baits while still having a ton of backbone and power came out.  This also coincided with the wide adoption of fluorocarbon line and the combination of the two made for the best way to present finesse baits into cover for highly pressured fish.  There simply aren't spinning rods that combine that sort of soft tip and backbone.  It's not that's its not possible to design a spinning rod that way it's just that a casting rod was chosen when the 1st rod of this build was made and was casting rod specifically to use baitcast reels with light fluoro and the rest was history. 

 

It's a complete misnomer that BFS means casting light weights with a baitcaster.  People have been doing that long before BFS was a thing and many manufactures that have casting versions of L and UL trout rods do not call them BFS rods and instead use that specifically to refer to a L or UL rod in their bass line of rods.  To distill it down to its simplest element "BFS" is a type of bass casting rod.  It's a nebulous term today because as soon as it leaked out of enthusiast circles that were importing and using these rods the wider fishing scene latched onto the term and has applied it to literally everything involving casting light weight baits with a baitcast reel.

 

 

Turn on captions and set them to auto translate to English to hear the story of BFS (you will have to use the youtube app for this).

 

[woolleyfooley]

19 hours ago, softwateronly said:

I just ordered the 7'9LT-BFS it's so much fun, both available at asian portal right now.  I'm not gonna run into a dd on my waters, but the dozen plus 20"+ LM, a few 18" SM, a 3'+ Northern, and a 25" King that I caught on bfs last year is a fine substitute for now.  A spinning set up could have done all of the same things, but the ease and comfort of casting currently takes it to another level of enjoyment for me.

 

scott

 

 

 

What reel is that? A zillion?

[softwateronly]

4 hours ago, woolleyfooley said:

What reel is that? A zillion?

Yeah, zillion with a roro x27 spool.  Lotta fun.

 

scott