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Posts: 20219
Location: oswego, il | I was curious what reel does everyone like to use when the air temps get below freezing. I am not asking what your favorite reels are in general but specifically what one performs well fishing in sub-freezing temps all day. I have alot of reels but most of them fail in this situation. All my penns stop working, my garcia tournaments freeze up and but my ultracasts work ok for awhile but do freeze eventually. I have not tried my calcutta. My best reel is an old (circa 1982) garcia 6000C. It's the only one I do not have troubles with. |
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Posts: 814
| Todd, when you find one let me know, here's what I've used and found.
Calcutta's 400 b's when its freezing the freespool button doesn't always pop back up, anti reverse always has worked.
Luna's the anti reverse is pretty much useless, but have never had trouble with the freespool not working, I think I got the anti reverse problem solved, we'll see next year.
Abu's, both the freespool and anti reverse totally went out haven't use'd these in a year or so....maybe there better now.
Next year I will be using a trinidad more in teh fall along with some 400te's that I got. I know a few guides that have used the trinidad's for other lures other than blades and they have seemed to work well so we'll see.
But for the most part when it's below freezing I am normally trolling or soaking sausage. I plan to change that next year! |
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| I run a Calcutta 400TE or 700TE on just about every rod in the boat and consider them pretty "average" for freezing temps. This past fall, however, I accidently found a reel far superior in cold weather. Close the very end of the season, my guest that day was having reel troubles but wanted to keep using his stick so I gave him a spare reel to use. The reel I grabbed from the dry box with the spares was a Penn 975, and that thing didn't seem to freeze not matter what. I was having my usual amount of trouble with the TEs, but he just casting away without any hassles. |
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| Guy's it's not the reel it's the lubricant.Just like ice reel's it's best to take all the old lube out.relube with dry lube or synthetic oil use a small amount of synthetic grease for the gear's. |
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Posts: 20219
Location: oswego, il | Guest, thanks for the tip. I need to try that. Schlagel, my 975 was useless, I could not make a single cast with my 975, 965 or my 955. With my penns, it seemed to be a drag issue, I just spun the handle and nothing happened.
One thing i have noticed is it is better to have the wire levewind guide verses the one with just a hole. Less ice buildup. Finding a reel with a mechanical anti-reverse and not a bearing seems to be better for these conditions too.
For line, power pro seems to work the best in icey conditions. I do have some cortland spectron on my 6000, that seems to work too. I have noticed that cortlans seems to only work with reels with a wire levelwind. |
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Posts: 531
Location: Hugo, MN | The problem isn't the reel, it's the water inside the reel. Before going out on REALLY cold days it would pay to bring your reels inside overnight to let them dry out. Once they're wet inside when it's cold, they'll usually stay that way until you dry them out. Take them apart in the fall a little more frequently and clean/oil them. You won't have nearly as many issues.
On the Penn, I've also found it to be my best cold weather reel. It doesn't seem to get as much moisture inside the reel as my old Abu's. My Okuma was pretty solid until the last day of the season, when the anti-reverse slipped a bit. This was probably due to moisture in the ARB feezing up. Not much you can do when it's around twenty degrees or below. If it's not the reels malfunctioning, it's the line and the guides freezing up. Just go until it acts up, then switch to the next one.
I've also found that when a reel acts up, the hand warmer packs do a nice job of freeing up frozen parts, for a little while anyway. |
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| One other thing that has worked has ben to spray the reel and line with pam.Have to do it every hour or so but it will work.Also work's on the the rod tip. |
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| ToddM, I might have just been lucky but it seriously worked great. I think "Guest" has hit on an important point. That Penn I mentioned was almost brand new and had only a couple hours of use on it. All my TEs have a million hours on them and the cleaning and re-lubing care they get is pretty sparse. That may likely be why the Penn did better than the Calcutta TEs during the last couple days of the season. The take home message might be that we all should clean and re-lube our reels at the beginning of October. |
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Best reel for sub-freezing temps