I was lucky enough to make two deep-drop trips this season, the first out of Key West, FL back in May with the folks from PENN in about 650 feet of water. Using chicken rig style setups, the glow squids were baited with bonito and/or squid and dropped to the bottom using the new PENN Fathom Electric reels (80 size class) spooled with 1,800 yards of 50-pound Berkley X5 braid. Literally at the push of a button, we loaded the box with blueline tiles and rose fish which ended up on our plates back at the Hogfish Grill on Stock Island.
My second trip was mid-summer back in the Hudson Canyon in about 500 feet of water, loading up on both goldens and bluelines. Now typically, you’ll find bluelines in ranges from 350 to 450 feet of water where golden tilefish roughly 475- to 675-foot depths, give or take. On this trip we were cranking by hand, a sporting effort mind you, but tiring with several pounds of weight on the bottom, baits that needed regular checking, and three to four baited hooks at once often leading to another 20 pounds of tile to bring up.
A lot of folks have made tilefishing a regular part of their offshore game plan during tuna trips just to ensure that there’s some mat in the box. And when it comes to “meat fishing” in 400 feet of water or more, I have to say that PENN Fathom Electric was my preferred method of deep-drop harvest.
Winner of a New Product Showcase award as well as Best of Show at this summer’s ICAST show in Florida, the PENN Fathom Electric Reel is one of the more innovative product offerings of 2024 in terms of coming in as the industry’s first-ever cordless electric reel option. Powered by a Lithium-Ion battery with 5 amp hours of capacity, there’s no need to carry a bulky 12-volt battery on and off the boat every trip, and no power cables to trip you up in the cockpit.
After fishing the PENN Fathom Electric in Key West in late spring, I had the chance to talk with PENN’s senior product manager Ben Joyce while in Orlando in July about this new Fathom, and he told me his team saw the need for such a reel with a fully integrated battery pack, free from cords. “We set out on a mission to take one of our best-selling conventional reels in the Fathom line and add an integrated battery to it,” Joyce said, while adding “The other thing we wanted to do is keep it really simple.”
That simplicity comes with a wide variety of programmable modes so that each drop can be custom-set to meet the needs of the day. Key features include an auto-stop mechanism for hands-free retrieves that anglers can set the preferred line length for stoppage, along with a simple override for manual jogging. One nicety I found while watching the fishfinder was that the line counter provide a really accurate line-out measurement, in either feet or meters
The throttle for retrieving line is in a great position on the reel and can be adjusted on the fly for lower or higher speed, and it does have a backup handle for those times when you need to do a little hand-cranking to get the bait off the bottom or working those tilefish into the boat, with an automatic kickback feature to avoid those knuckle busting moments when deploying rigs. The PENN Fathom Electric has maximum winding power of 35 pounds and can achieve speeds of up to 750 feet per minute varying by reel size.
“This cordless reel, levels up the opportunities for anglers by making electric reel fishing more accessible than ever,” Joyce added, which comes at a great time as the popularity of Northeast tilefishing continues to grow. The PENN Fathom Electric is ideal for most of our deep-dropping activities, reaching depths of up to 1000 feet, and is now available throughout the region in 30, 50, 80 sizes that are well-priced considering the technology from $799.95 to $899.95. In terms of accessories, a spare battery runs about $99, same price for a single battery charger.
