New Daiwa Lexa reel meets salmon

Cabela's has been advertising the new line of Daiwa line counter reels for the last 3 or 4 months and since all my trolling reels are Daiwa Sealine's and they have held up very well, I was interested in trying one out. I chose to try the Lexa 100 which is the smallest of the line and as it turns out, it appears that they took a baitcasting reel and just put a line counter on it. As you can note in the photo below, the Lexa 100 is very compact yet is has enough line capacity for trolling. It also has 6 + 1 bearings so it is very smooth and it has a good drag system. Regardless of what is on the fishfinder, I always have one pole at or near the bottom and I decided that this is where I would try out the Lexa 100. Most of the year, I fish worm harnesses so the deep pole has a 3 ounce in line weight and hits bottom (50 ft. depth) with about 90 feet of line out and gets set at anywhere from 105 to 120 depending on speed and conditions.
Given the compact size, it is really comfortable to fish with and is very solid. Now for the acid test.
I was fishing this past Saturday out of the Sheffield Lake Ramp and went due north to 50ft and started trolling north east. Fishing was very slow and oddly enough I did not get a single junk fish bite all day. I had caught two walleyes in the first hour and a half when all of a sudden, the deep pole gets a huge strike and line it feeding out like crazy. By the time I had picked the pole up and tried to start reeling in, the line counter was reading 150. No big walleye, sheephead or catfish would pull line this fast and this hard so assumed it was a salmon and that was confirmed when he jumped out of the water. For the next 10 minutes I was trying to gain on him but he kept pulling line back out. After 10 minutes, he was getting a bit tired and I could finally start reeling him in. Once I got him to 100 feet, I saw why he was pulling so hard. I use a #4 treble hook as the rear hook on my harnesses and the salmon was hooked in tail and had been swimming away from me with all his might. I got him to the boat and went to net him and he gave it one more college try and broke off the treble hook and got away. I had a 5Lb. salmon smoked last year and this one by comparison, looked to be 7-8lbs.
Bottomline: the Lexa 100 performed great and would recommend it to anyone who is in the market for a new reel.

Thanks for the report. Sounds exciting, glad you are happy with the new reel. The fish could have been a Salmon but odds are it was a Steelhead. They look similar, the mouth and jaw is one of the bigger differences between them. Here is a map of steelhead stocked streams.