"Wayne B" wrote in message
...

On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:05:34 -0400, "F.O.A.D." wrote:

1. Before you burned out your reel (btw, Penn has or had a rebuilding
service), what poundage were you setting the drag at? There are
relatively inexpensive mechanical fishing line drag weight scales that
tell you this. Obviously, on your defunct Penn, you could not set the
drag at 200#. Usually, drag is set at only a reasonable percentage of
what is available. I fished for stripers on the Bay here with 8 or 10#
test, with the drag set at 4 pounds. But, then, I was either holding the
rod or sitting next to it.


I'll check with Penn when I get home, thanks. I have no idea what
the drag poundage was set for. I usually set it up fairly firmly but
loose enough that I can still strip some line out by hand. I'm
guessing 15 to 20 pounds. If I get a big strike that is stripping
out a lot of line, I'll turn the drag down some more. The biggest
fish that I've landed so far was a large Mahi that was a tad over 5 ft
long and weighed in the 40 to 50 pound range. He was still stripping
out line against full drag 10 to 15 minutes after I hooked him.

2. From what I understand from your posts, the real problem is that you
might not notice right away that you have a "hit," and then it takes you
a bit of time to get from wherever you are on your boat to where the rod
is located. I don't know how noisy your boat is when the engines are
running, but perhaps an answer might be to put some sort of "tell" on
the road you can hear from where you are piloting the boat.

I used to have that problem when I had the rods at the stern of the
boat but I've moved the rod holders up to the flybridge where I hear
the strikes right away. I still have to throttle back to idle, shift
to neutral if it sounds big, go to the back of the flybridge, grab the
rod, etc. Probably takes 5 to 10 seconds, more if we're rolling a
lot..


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The lever drags have bigger drag washers than the star drags normally.