[Gerry Zagorski]

Originally Posted by Tommyg17

Thank you guys for all your replies!

This was my first thread, and I am pleasently surprised by the quick responses. thanks again

Tom

Welcome to the site Tommy and that's how we roll on NJfishing.com

For what it's worth, I own several Avet reels and the advice above is spot on. Unless you are going to be using the SX for casting, you don't need to spend the extra money on the MC cast control models.

I like level winds as well, but what I found over the years is that it's one more moving part that can break. Futher, if you are used to fishing reels where the drag automatically engages when you crank the reel, this is going to take some getting used to as well. This is one of the main reasons people stay with these sorts of reels instead of lever drags like the Avet and others, where you have to manually engage the drag into strike.

One other thing to be aware of and that will take some getting used to is the line out/drag adjustments. You will see underneath the drag lever there is a round knob with numbers on it. This allows you to preset the drag to whatever tension you'd like when you put the drag lever in the strike position. It also effects the line out tension when you are a click above free spool..... Here in lies the issue with lever drag reels. There is no way to adjust the line out tension with out effecting the strike drag setting. In other words if you'd like to tweak the line out to make it tighter, this will also tighten the drag for the strike setting...

It sounds confusing but follow me here......

There are 4 positions for the drag lever.
- First is total free spool and no matter what you have the drag knob set to, it will not put any tension on the spool.
- Second engages the drag slightly and puts a slight amount of drag tension on the line. If you want more tension for this setting you need to tighten the drag knob.
- Third is strike and this is also effected by your drag knob setting so what ever you set the drag knob on it will effect the line tension on this position as well as the second position. So, there is really no way to adjust these tensions separately.
- Forth is full and no matter what the drag knob is set to, it will put the reel in the predetermined factory max drag setting for your particular reel.

With most non level wind star drag reels, in addition to the star drag, they also have a separate line out tension adjustment. So, when you are in free spool you can adjust the line out tension to any setting you like, with out effecting the drag setting. A nice feature especially if you are a lazy dead sticker like me. It allows you to put your pole in the holder in free spool and adjust the tension just enough to keep line from coming off the reel while your sinker is bouncing off the bottom, but gives the fish some line if you get a strike. Once you get the strike and you feel the fish has got a good hold of your bait, you can then engage the fighting drag.

Am I making any sense here

Having said all this, you'd think I'd prefer using a star instead of lever drag reel. However, lever drag reels in my opinion have a few key advantages that outweigh the disadvantages. Lever drags have a much larger drag surface then star drag reels. They have drag plates that are much like a disk break in your car as opposed to smaller drag washers on star drags. This makes for a silky smooth drag even at the tightest settings and makes them less prone to failure when put under a lot of pressure. The other advantage is you can really make finer tuned adjustments to your preset strike drag setting. Further, if you need a bit more drag when you are in the midst of trying to turn a fish, you can just move the lever up from strike to full and as mentioned above this will put the reel into max factory drag setting.

Here is an article that does a much more eloquent job then I did explaining the differences in star vs lever drag. http://www.boatersworld.com/static/bwarticles/product/star-lever.html


Good luck with your decision and hope I haven't done more to confuse, rather then help you