Commentary: Digital reel eliminates backlash, but isn’t cheap

As soon as I laid hands on Shimano’s Calcutta TE 100DC reel, I spooled it with 14-pound test line, attached it to a suitably nice rod and walked into my back yard.

A north wind was blowing about 15 miles per hour.

I tied on a plastic jerkbait that weighed about half an ounce and adjusted the spool tension so the weight of the lure pulled line smoothly off the reel when I took it out of gear.

I then set the digital control brake about midway out of eight control settings.

With the reel thus set, I lofted a cast into the wind. The reel worked very smoothly, as expected with any brand-new casting reel. I’ve been fishing with revolving spool reels for 40 years.

Like any angler with even marginal experience, I’ve learned to read the reel and use thumb pressure to slow the spool speed and avoid, or at least minimize, backlash.

Don’t get me wrong. I still backlash, as does everyone else I’ve ever fished with, including guys such as Larry Nixon, Gary Klein, Rick Clunn and all the other pros who own a revolving spool reel.

At any rate, I’ve got a 40-year history of backlashes that made the Calcutta reel intriguing to me. I’d read about the digital control technology that not only reduced the potential for backlash but also enabled anglers to cast farther than they could cast with convention reels.

When I first started fooling with the new reel, I believed it would work, but it took several casts to convince my thumb that it did not have to slow the spool speed while casting into the wind.

With each cast, I reduced thumb pressure a little more until I was finally making long, high casts into the wind with absolutely no thumb pressure on the spool. Just when a normal reel would have fuzzed up the line into a nightmare tangle, the TE 100DC spool would slow by its own accord. The worst I could manage, casting into the wind, was three or four extra spool rotations.

Don’t ask me how it works. I read the literature and still don’t understand it. Neither does Shimano publicist John Mazurkiewicz.

“It’s like the reel recognizes when the spool is moving too fast and slows itself down,” Mazurkiewicz said. “This reel has two amazing qualities. One is the resistance to backlash. The other advantage is that it allows incredibly long casts.”

Such cutting-edge technology is expensive. The Calcutta TE DC series reels (which come in different sizes) cost $500. When Shimano introduced the first Calcutta reel in 1991, it cost $139 and sent financial shock waves through the freshwater fishing market.

Mazurkiewicz said Shimano is pleasantly surprised at how well the $500 reels are selling. At a Birmingham, Ala., promotion where customers had the opportunity to cast the reels, Mark’s Outdoor Sports sold 72 in one day.

As with most new technology, the price of these reels will hopefully decline with time. With a casting reel this easy to use, there’s a potential market on both ends of the experience scale.