Good question, and I don't know the answer. I do think that we often go
overboard on the subject of backing. In forty-odd years of steelhead
fishing, I've never had a steelhead, even a big one, take anywhere near a
hundred yards of backing. What could you do with a with a fish that was the
length of a football field away from you anyway, especially in a river? The
(admittedly small) five pound steelhead that I caught on a 4-weight was into
the backing several times, but not by much, and probably never more than a
hundred and twenty feet away from me, and the Orvis Madison III reel that I
was using carries well over a hundred yards of 20-lb backing with a WF4F
line. That was on the Stilly in a fairly slow moving pool and I can well
imagine that a very hot fish in a big, fast river like much of the
Deschutes would be a different ball game.
