Thanks for all of the suggestions. Yes I have some experience with cheap reals. I bougth the reels for my dad's boat a few years back and I think the initial reel I bought was the Okuma magda pro if I recall. It was their entry level reel and I had all kinds of trouble getting them to engage/disengage. After quite a bit of back and forth with Okuma I sent them into them for repair. They had them for a couple of months, and long story short with customer service experience that was not great they replaced them with the convector series of reel. Now with a few trips with them they are better but I do still have some trouble with the line counter not engaging on a couple of the reels. Nothing more frustrating then putting the line out and having to mess around 2-3 times to get the line counter to begin.

My big question would be the action and length of trolling rods. I think the rods I bought previously were a cabela's depthmaster rod of some type. I can't recall the length and action of them though. Is a medium action 7.5' rod enough backbone for the dipsey's? I'm sure there is a sweet spot in there between a good fighting rod and enough backbone to pull the dipsey's.