Andy Morgan has a lineup of Lew's reels he depends on to get him through long practices and tournament days. He prioritizes lightweight reels, with high gear ratios. Check out his top three favorites.
I have an old 8.0:1 Lew’s speed spool which I’ve had for about four or five years. I’ve caught a ton of bass on this old flipping reel and it still is smooth as butter. I always have a couple rods with it that are ready to go.
I got a few new reels this year that I really like but it’s always hard to put down the old ones. I have had great durability from all my Lew’s reels, I still have a few that are six, seven, or even eight years old that had a lot of time on them.
This new one is a pretty bad dude. The Lew’s Pro-Ti 7.5:1 is what I cast mostly, especially with buzzbait, spinnerbait, swim jig, vibrating jig, or whatever it is you have that makes noise. It has a ton of power, yet is still plenty fast.
I prefer high gear ratios normally, I’ll use a 6.8 earlier in the year, but as the water warms up, I’ll throw something that moves pretty quick in the shallow water.
I like to keep rocking on, so the high gear ratio fits my style a little better. And in this Pro-Ti you can run the magnets up and make those casts that skip around under docks or trees. You can still make great distance with the magnets up, which I haven’t seen in all reels. They’re usually not free enough to keep the skip going, but the Pro-Ti you can turn it up a little bit and keep the backlash down.
This Pro-Ti from Lew’s is an awesome reel, I still don’t believe how smooth and durable it is. The Pro-Ti, to me, is really solid in your hand and holds so much power, but you just got to try it out.
This is my bread and butter; I like to flip and pitch, so I base my gameplan around this. I like the 8+ gear ratio because it gives me the speed and power that I need to do what I like.
If you’re trying to retrieve your bait over the top of heights to keep it from being tangled or you get a big fish, you’ll want to have enough power and speed to keep up with it and get it out of the cover.
The same goes with shallow water when you set the hook, you’ll want to keep control and be fast enough to keep the line tight and rod loaded before you lose the fish.
It is super important to have a reel that lets you keep up with the bass. When a fish is coming at you, it’s coming quick. I’ve found that the 2 to 4 pounders, tend to be the quickest fish out there, and they’re the ones you don’t want to lose.
The HyperMag is super smooth to skip with, especially on a 7 to 7.5 ft rod, but really whatever you have it’ll be smooth. You can turn the brakes up and still get distance on your skips, just like the Pro-Ti, but this keeps the loop down as well to help with the kinks in line. Fluorocarbon keeps loops because it holds memory, but when your turn the magnets up just a little bit it keeps the loops down and reduces all the kinks and memory.
I don’t get fatigued when fishing a 12-to-14-hour practice day, because of how light-weight the HyperMag is. You can flip, pitch, do everything you need to do all day long, even with heavy weights. It's light, quick, durable and did I say fast? And quick? Quick and fast, quick and fast.
