Decided to try out Okuma's largest trolling reel, the TG-50IIW which I bought from an ebay seller in Taiwan. The reel is nice to look at, finished in Gold colour like the Penn Internationals and Shimano Tiagra's. It also feels pretty sturdy and whilst not at large/wide as a Penn 50VW it looked like it could hold quite a bit of line.

The Titus Gold's benefit from higher quality HPB bearings and carbon drag washers, which our a welcomed upgrade over the fiberglass drags found on the std Titus range. The reel is all metal, so now carbon fiber type sideplates on this reel.

Before I go on, I picked up the reel for $228 excl shipping which is pretty reasonable....spooled it up with around 600 yards of 50lbs Momoi Diamond mono and headed off to test in out!

The first thing to report is that sadly, this reel like other Okuma Titus's still seems to suffer from a rather on/off drag at lighter settings. What I mean is that after deploying your lure and setting the drag fairly light (enough for the line not to spool out with waves/current and a tad more to ensure the hook sets on strike) I've found that the drag comes on either too light or too heavy, there isn't really a progressive in between. About the only thing you can do is back off the drag adjustment knob effectively reducing the strike and full drag pressures so that you can move the drag lever up closer to strike without the on/off effect. Technically you're only supposed to adjust the drag knob with the drag lever backed off completely, you're not supposed to do it with it up on strike etc although I'm sure some people do! If you're very fussy about setting up the drags on your reel for specific fish like Swordfish etc that have softer mouths, you probably do this in conjunction with a scale to measure the pressure, so changing it mid fight kinda mucks things up.

I ended up settling for an in between setting as I knew I wouldn't be hitting into any very large fish above 30kgs so I was happy to compromise somewhat on the max drag pressure I would get when moving the drag lever to full.

It had not problem with 15kgs Albacore which should be the least of it's worries and changing between low and high speed without issues. The drag alarm is louder than previous models, something that has been annoying with most Okuma Titus rees, they're just too damn quiet! I'd probably compare it's potential performance to a 30lbs class reel from the likes of Penn or Shimano, but then again you're not paying Penn/Shimano money.

I would say for the price it's a good reel for fish up to around 30-40kgs without worrying it will fail on you, and with the added benefit of being two speed and having a large line capacity.