Stopped by and saw the excellent people at squidco today and handled a bunch of rods/reels. Anticipating doing a little more BTB fishing sometime soon and I'm trying to build up the arsenal with a fairly decent first all-around rod/reel that'll be able to handle jigging and live bait fishing around kelp forests.
Picked up a few rods and the one that really stood to me was the seeker black steel 670. Too bad because I was hoping I could get by with a ugly stik tiger... but you know how it is once you start comparing rods and reels...
The sealine sl30sh felt really good to me, but the saltist reels felt even better. Any of you use the saltist black gold STTBG35h? How does that 6:4 retrieve work for you with irons? I will probably have most of that reel spooled with 65 spectra.
Question -- does spooling line on a narrow reel really make a lot of difference over a whole day? I've almost always used levelwind reels up till now. Kinda wondering if that's something I really should think about with the sealine's wider spool.
One issue, though... I have a crappy shoulder. I normally crank RH but I think the strain of those big fish I'm anticipating catching would be better handled with my right arm. Go figure, there's only a handful of LH reels, and those are made by avet and abu. I'm not an abu guy and would prob want to stick with avet if that's my only choice.
I handled an mxl lh reel and it felt really crisp and tight, but also a little "cold" to me. I liked the feel of the daiwas better. Was wondering if I'm missing any other good 30-35 class reel in a LH retrieve?
Last thing -- I also handled a lamiglas as TFX 7040 CT and wow, I was pretty impressed with how light and powerful that thing felt, like it'd be a totally awesome calico swimbait rod with a curado 300e on it. The rod's rated for 20-40 lbs. and 4-10 oz. Felt like one of the most fun and well balanced rods I've handled in a while.
Thanks for all of the advice. Really appreciate it!
