Offshore Tuesday on an important mission – testing our lightweight Dragon 7000 electric reel:
It’s very similar in appearance and operation to the Daiwa Tanacoms we’ve offered for many years:
But lighter, and cheaper. We’ve been using it all season, jigging for kingfish at Texas Reef, and albacore at Browns:
We’d never seriously fished the bottom with it in deep water. Tuesday was to be the day. On the way out, we had some crazy whale action happening:
In case anyone’s wondering why we didn’t power on out of there, the whales were all around – and underneath – our boat. Just too risky:
Super surprised that, when we arrived at Brown’s, only two boats there? And one of those left soon after. Water colour was a horrible murky green, with lots of suspended sediment. Still, the week before, we had a fantastic session. Blue eye, gemfish, and a shark to round out the day. My new Lowrance HDS-9 was playing up and couldn’t even give me a depth reading – let alone show fish marks. Thankfully we had some good marks stored in the GPS, and the current was light and manageable. Fitz kicked things off with a nice Alfonsino – probably the best eating deep water fish of all:
Meantime I got the Dragon into action. The big plus with this combo is firstly that its light, and easy to use:
You can use it as a regular rod and reel, for jigging or whatever. With the other benefit being, low price. The whole combo including overhead two-piece 24 kilo rod, Dragon 7000 reel and power cable, full spool of 15 or 24 kilo braid, and deep drop rigs is just $795 plus postage. But the big question was, could this smaller reel pull up a pair of good size gemfish? No problem at all:
Such a good outfit. Especially for:
Those on a budget
Anglers who want to try deep dropping but aren’t out there often
Blokes with arthritis or old football injuries
Chaps who want a powered reel to wind the jig up to the surface
Drop me an email if you’d like to know more? This combo ticks a lot of boxes:
I should also mention that, in the end September sea shipment, we're bringing in some batteries for these Dragons. They screw straight into the reel's power port - meaning you don't need a separate cable or battery:
Back into Sydney with some quality fish that day and looking forward to doing it all again later this week
Andrew Hestelow