It is free if your a native American.

They do restock fish everywhere but not anywhere near what California does, California has a large population and that population over fish the lakes and streams, so California has a lot more fish hatcheries than any other state, someone has to pay for those fish hatcheries and the fishing population pays for it since they are the ones sucking the fish out of the water. The alternative would be to allow people only to fish every other year, allowing a full year for fish to repopulate on their own, I think most people would scream at that, or they could do a lottery program like they do for deer hunting in California, and only a certain number of people would be allowed to fish any given year which again would allow fish to repopulate on their own, more screaming from the fishing people, so you have fish hatcheries and expensive fishing license to pay for it all. The license fee also helps pay for water conservation projects.

People have fished for years without braid and have not had any trouble catching fish.

Now the different lines have their speciality that they're good at, braid excels at trolling but that's it!, for ultralight fishing and sensitivity you want to use a hybrid copolymer line; then use a fluorocarbon line for large fish in clear water, this line sinks faster than braid or mono making it idea for deep diving lures and baits. Copolymer line, also known as hybrid line is a braided line that has been fused and comes out looking like a ribbon instead of a round line, this is a floating line, so it's good for floating lures and baits, it's also the thinnest of the different lines, this is the idea line for ultralight fishing with ultralight reels and rods. Mono is cheaper to buy and it's universally a pretty good line, but the larger diameter per test pound makes for shorter casts, and it has memory issues, the longer it's on your spool the more it will curl up and the shorter your casts will become.

Now braided line you have to be careful with because if your fishing where there is a lot of rocks or submerged trees etc braided line can fail pretty quickly, so some people use a mono leader to prevent that.

If you go with braided consider using SpiderWire, it has a special coating on the line that helps it to cast further than other braids. If you are considering the hybrid braided line then go with Berkely Fireline. Be careful when buying braided line, cheap braided line can literally saw through your first eyelet at the end of your rod! The most difficult line for fish to see is the hybrid and the fluorocarbon. So chose the line for the type of fishing you're doing.

Before you run out and buy a new fishing rod and reel to get some sensitivity back, I would try replacing the line first and see what happens, that will be cheaper to do than a new rod! I think you'll find that a new line will do wonders...unless your using some 40 year old bargain basement rod!!

Well wouldn't that be nice? Except for one HUGE problem. Those licensing fees help go towards restocking the lakes and streams in California, so if they only collected a half a year of licensing fees then you would get a lot less fish stocked, then people won't like to fish much due to the lack of fish, then more people won't buy licenses, and...well you can see the domino effect. So since you fish, and you take your share out of those lakes and streams pay your damn license for the whole year and be happy about it!

Yes, but then why would you get the license in July? unless it was your first attempt to ever get a license in California, so Ok, your first license was in July, after that you buy the license in Jan for the remainder of your life in Calif. There were times I waited till March to get a license in Calif, I didn't care it ended at the end of Dec, I just always tried to get a new license in Jan.

This is an old topic. Look, it doesn't matter when you get your license, it's good for a year, whether you get it from Jan 1 to Dec 31 all the months of a year are covered, the same is true if you get it on July 31 to June 1st, it's a year, all the months are covered no matter when you get it, you're just arguing over semantics.

When you say realistic, do you mean budget price realistic? or high end price realistic? or somewhere in the middle realistic?

I'm going to assume you mean budget since maybe you all don't fish that much.

One of the best spinning reels in the budget price range is the Penn Pursuit series, they cost around $60.

One of the best spinning rods for the money is the Ugly Stik Elite series, they cost around $50.

So for around $110 you can get a halfway decent starter fishing set up, unless you really want to go even cheaper, you can get a combo Ugly Stik GX2 spinning combo setup for $50, this will get you started with a rod and a reel.

Of course you have to buy some fishing line, and variety of hooks, weights, and bobbers if you're going to bait fish which is the cheapest way to start. Lure fishing is very expensive and without knowing the proper technique for each lure type you will spend money without success, lure fishing is difficult even with knowing techniques for each lure. You'll also need a tackle box to put your small stuff into, the good one for the money is the Plano Weekend Series, it only cost $20, great starter box.

Of course I'm only making suggestions, others will have other suggestions, you'll need to weigh out these suggestions and decide which might work the best for you.

I think most lures on the market today are not really designed with catching fish in mind as much as they are design to catch the fishermen!

I think fish are smart enough to know when something isn't quite right, it doesn't look like what it should look like in nature. Of course I don't believe they're contemplating it, but more like it's instinct, real fish don't have a long line attached to it, this they see and know something's wrong. How far can we take that? I don't know, but I do know I tried green line that I had been using in algae water in a clear stream and didn't catch anything, so I switched reels to one that had clear line and I started to catch fish, I've had that happen before too. They use to make this glowing purplish bluish mono line quite a few years ago (not sure if they still make this stuff or not) that you could see real easily, and you could see it in the water, it was pretty cool looking, but I had miserable success at catching fish for a long time, then some guy saw me using this stuff and told be to get rid of it and go to clear mono, I did and my catch rate went up. This was on a river where bass was not prominent, supposedly bass can't see the blue or purple line.

So why deal with all the what if's when you can simply use clear fluorocarbon line in any type of water?

Some pros I heard are coloring their braided lines black, so do they know something we don't?

Here is a video, skip ahead to 2:00 in the video to get pass all the BS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IsIJFyH13A

Here is another video showing different weights of lines, skip ahead to 3:17 to get to the meat of the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4NFKd4lKhw

Who can tell what a fish can see and not see, scientists are saying they can see as well as a human can...how do they determine that? after all it's the brain that interprets what the eyes see, not the eyes, as far as I know we haven't got the technology to go inside a fish's brain and see what it sees.

Lures do move better with lighter line.

All of you guys are out of date with the newest science. It's now been proven that pink fluorocarbon line completely turns invisible in water, so you can see the line above water but you can't see below water no matter the clarity of lack thereof of the water. So if you like to see your line then use pink fluorocarbon.

Some say red is also invisible, and you would think that makes sense since it's close to pink, but fish do see red, this is why for many years lures have used red to simulate blood.

There are other colors that work in different situations like green for algae water, yellow for muddy water.

Braided line for some reason is different, any color you use they can see unless of course you use yellow for muddy and green for algae, that is why it's highly recommended that you use a fluorocarbon leader line because using straight braided line is the most visible line for fish to see of all the lines man has created.

If it bit the line so fast that the bell didn't ring you might have gotten a Pike or a Pickerel, but especially Pike.

Why was my stuff deleted? It was here yesterday, it's gone now. I'm not going to rewrite it.

On a lake you would actually be just fine using sinking line and wet flies, it can even work with floating line a dry flies with a long leader between 12 to 15 feet, but the lake water needs to be at least slightly stirred and not still.

I have another hobby, cycling, that most of my hobby money goes to, so since I don't fish a lot I don't spend a lot of money on fishing gear, so I only have one fly rod myself, (I have another cane fly pole but it was my granddads so I don't use it because it's in pristine condition), anyway I make do with on fly rod for everything, stream, lake, wet, dry. I have a couple spinning rods and reels I use too but I need to get new ones as those have seen better days. So I don't see anything wrong with using your 9 foot rod with 8 weight line for stuff that "a true" fly fisherman wouldn't use it for.

Just go fish with what you got.

If you want to go and spend some money but don't want to spend a lot then check out either Redington Crosswater outfit fly combo combo I saw $169, or the Orvis Encounter Fly Rod and reel combo for $143 at FishUSA (internet), or the L.L. Bean Quest for $129. The LL Bean got the lowest review, but it's also the cheapest, the other two all got 4 1/2 stars so for the price the Orvis Encounter is the best deal in a bargain fly combo. Something to consider if money is a bit tight.