Manufacturers and anglers often focus a lot on the material and ratio of gears in fishing reels. Often overlooked, however, is cranking power and retrieval speed. These factors are related to gear quality and gear ratio and critically affect lure retrieval as well as fish playing.

Many folks are enamored with high-speed (high gear ratio) reels because of a general fondness for speed. But does a high-speed reel have the power to crank in a heavy load?

Cranking Power

If you’ve ever struggled to turn the reel handle while retrieving a hard-pulling deep-diving plug, a big inanimate object that you’ve inadvertently snagged, or a bulldogging fish, then you’re familiar with the problem. The gears can’t handle the heavy strain without the angler constantly lifting the rod and then simultaneously lowering the rod and turning the handle. In severe circumstances the gears could be stripped, meaning that the teeth don’t grab properly and that the gears need to be replaced.

In a nutshell, the lowest gear ratio reels have the greatest cranking power, and the highest gear ratio reels have the least cranking power. Reels with a low gear ratio and high rate of line recovery are better for playing large and/or powerful fish and for retrieving hard-pulling lures. Such reels simply have more power, are less likely to bind, are less likely to get stripped gears, and require less effort to land tough fish.

Reels with a high gear ratio necessarily have smaller teeth, which means less surface to make contact.

This means that they have poor cranking strength and require a lot of pumping and winding to recover line. An inexperienced angler is more likely to do damage on a high gear ratio reel when the smaller gear teeth are placed under a heavy load.

A reel with a high gear ratio may be preferable for cast-and-retrieve fishing with lures that don’t pull hard, but a reel with a low (or at least lower) gear ratio is preferable for situations that place severe stress on the reel. With high-speed reels, what is gained in retrieval speed is lost in cranking power.

Handle Length Matters

The length of the reel handle is a factor in the amount of leverage you can put on the handle. So it also has a bearing on cranking power. The longer the handle the more leverage and the easier it is to retrieve a set load. A long handle reduces force at the knob end. It’s essentially the same principle as having a long-handled wrench.

More About Speed

To get both speed and cranking power, some manufacturers have created reels with two-speed gears. This is primarily found in big-game lever drag reels, but has been tried with a few other reel types, though with modest consumer acceptance, probably because few freshwater anglers understand the issue. With two-speed operation you can switch between a higher and a lower gear ratio by moving a knob or lever (some two-speed baitcasting reels have automatic shifting based on line load).

When using baitcasting reels that had manual two-speed adjustment, most people found that they did nearly all of their fishing in the high-speed mode (about 6:1) because the low speed (about 3.5:1) was just too slow for retrieving most lures, and, since they were catching generally small fish, this didn’t place too much strain on the smaller teeth of the higher speed gears.

High-speed reels are popular in freshwater because most of the fish caught in freshwater are small on average or do not put up a long tackle-testing struggle, anglers can quickly catch up to fish that run toward them (as many bass do), and they can retrieve some lures quickly.

People who fish jigs and worms tend to like a reel with a high gear ratio, since it lets them pick up a lot of slack with each turn of the handle. But fishing a large spinnerbait, and especially a deep-diving plug, is wrist punishing unless the reel has cranking power, meaning that a slow-speed reel is preferable there.