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Earlier this year, after some local encounters with big barra that did take me into the backing and left me wishing I had a better drag system as well as a planned trip to Christmas Island, where I plan to target some seriously big GTs, I decided to upgrade the reels that I use in my salt water fishing.

A little on-line research and a few discussions with trusted friends gave me some good options to follow. What I finally settled on is the Hardy Ultralight SDS 10,000 reels.

This reel jumped out at me from the start. They are beasts and have an impressive capacity of backing. I have gone for 70lb braid for backing and so that the backing is not the weak point in my system and even then 300 meters of backing fits easily. As well as the backing not being the weak point in the system by using 70lb backing which is considerably thicker than the regular 30lb or 50lb backing that shown when calculating line capacity for most salt water reels, this heavier backing is more resistant to tangles and of course not as likely to cut fingers. The reel also has a drag that provides up to 13lb of direct force drag and then if line is still taken it releases line ever so smoothly. That doesn't sound like much but get a 13lb weight and tie your leader to that and try to drag it across the floor with a bent rod ... OMG. They are also seriously large arbour and at 4.7 inches in diameter retrieve up to 14 inches of line for each turn of the spool. If a fish is running toward you that can be a big advantage.

I started by purchasing one Hardy Ultralight SDS 10,000 reel earlier this year, but it has been so good over the last few months that I have purchased a second reel as well as a spare spool.

I generally have two rods set up when fishing salt water. One with an intermediate line and the other with a fast sink line. I also like to have my floating line handy that can quickly be swapped with either the intermediate or fast sink line. With the three spools and the two reels swapping lines takes me around only two minutes.

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