Reel Review

[Crestliner08]

A few days ago I received my new UL spinning reel from Amazon.com. (I returned a previous reel which I negatively reviewed here last month.) This new reel is an Okuma Ultralite 10. It has only 3 ball bearings, but retrieves as smoothly as my Shimano Symetre 750. The drag is very smooth as well; I experienced no stickyness when drag was pulled during the fights. About the only negative feature I've found with this reel at all is it's lack of I.A.R. (Instant Anti-Reverse), which I've come to "expect" in spinning reels today. And to be fair, it did not specify this feature in the reel's description. My bad!

All in all, I am very pleased with it's performance over the past few day; having caught between 25 - 35 decent crappie with it thus far, along with several yellow perch and a few bluegill. I filled the first spool (it does come with a plastic secondary spool) with 4# test Fireline Crystal fused line. This may have been a mistake in that I like to use a fluoro leader for reduced visibility in our clear waters here. This fused line is so sensitive that I found myself breaking off the joint (using the Alberto knot) between my leader, even with relatively light hooksets. After tying direct to my jigs with the Fireline, it did not appear to have any negative impact to my strike ratio, so maybe it's not really necessary afterall?

To summarize, if you need an inexpensive back-up (or main) panfish reel, I would highly recommend you check out this reel. At less than $20.00, it will certainly work for me.

[joey]

Thanks!

[chaunc]

Just be aware of the bail spring. Had a pair of these reels years ago while looking for inexpensive reels. Everything you said about them is true, but the bail springs are weak and break quickly. They can be replaced but they're hard to work with. Hope you have better luck with them than i did. And remember, you get what you pay for, so dont complain later.