Ron
The closed face reel is one I really hadn't considered mainly because I don't trust them any more , I had a series of Shakespeare closed face reels for tossing small light lures and while they were fine most of the time on the odd occasion they played up and the line jammed and the lure would come back at me , I figured that my reels had come to their use by date and replaced them with a new Zebco that was new on the market here , they had been released with a bit of fan fare and definitely not a cheap item ,
That reel was the worst one I'd ever had , it jammed more than it worked and in a brackish environment seemed imposable to keep from going rusty , I baby my gear and wash them off in fresh water and dry them off after every trip but nothing could keep this bugger from rust , to make matters worse I'd bought a Zebco Spinning reel at the same time and it was the same , seemed like the drag had been cut with a axe it was so rough and it would start rusting as soon as it was shown a picture of salt water , after two weeks I'd had enough and took them back to the store , store said that over 50% of them had been returned and the agent would no longer answer phone calls and it seemed that the phone had been disconnected , these days the only people selling Zebco reels in Australia do so through Ebay .
I just couldn't bring my self to trust them , sounds like you have had years of good service out of yours but I still couldn't trust them , about a year ago a mate bought a PSE kingfisher bow fishing rig and also bought the Zebco reel seat and Zebco reel , about the third shot with it and the zebco the reel jammed about 10 ft out and the line didn't snap , the arrow come back almost as fast as it went out and just grazed the side of his face , just deep enough to leave a scar .
Mate doesn't trust them any more either , he now uses the reel that come with the PSE , I think it was from Cajun archery
By the way Ron that was one nice gar
David
