OCR’s Bighorn semi-automatic reel is great at what it does, but is it worth the $900 price of admission? Read on.
Aside from newer materials replacing old ones, and the Victorians inventing khakis, fly fishing fundamentals have remained relatively unchanged for centuries. Because anglers and fish haven’t evolved significantly, truly groundbreaking advancements are hard to come-by and rare. The same fly patterns, rods, and reels that caught fish a hundred years ago still catch fish today. To sell new items every year in a saturated market, established brands tempt customers with new color schemes, new marketing buzzwords, or incremental and sometimes dubious advancements of existing products. Rarely do they offer something truly new. New is risky, so revolution is left to newcomers who seek to disrupt the status quo and carve a niche for themselves.
OCR Fly Reels of Buffalo, Wyoming, is one such company seeking to improve the fly fishing experience with their innovative American-made semi-automatic Bighorn Fly Reel. But, is it innovation or a gimmick?
Semi-automatic What Now?
In the 1950s and 60s, one attempted innovation were spring-loaded automatic fly reels. For anglers who handline their fish, these were an interesting idea. A lever held under the pinky, when activated, released a spring that spun the reel spool rapidly, sucking up slack and easily getting you tight to your fish. Though you can still buy them, in practice spring-action reels are finnicky and difficult to load, service, change lines, and use—something familiar to anyone who has fought a vacuum’s power cord or a zinger tool retractor that stops zinging.
With a semi-automatic fly reel, there is far less to go wrong as there is no spring. Instead, the lever engages a gear or gears that spin the reel spool. The more and faster you pump the lever, the more line gets spooled onto the reel and the faster it does so. In practice, I was able to get the spool to turn four or five turns for every pump. When I first held OCR’s Bighorn Fly Reel at the 2024 Fly Fishing Show in Bellevue, WA, I could envision several scenarios aside from handlining where the ability to rapidly manage slack with one hand would be a massive advantage.
A Boon for Euronymphers.
Over the last several years competitive fly anglers and pundits like Joe Humphreys (https://hhd.psu.edu/kines/undergraduate/joe-humphreys-fly-fishing-program), Devin Olsen (https://tacticalflyfisher.com) and Dom Swentosky (https://www.troutbitten.com) have popularized what is variously known as Czech-nymphing, tightline nymphing, and euronymphing. Whatever you call it, success requires the angler to keep their line tight to the nymph and manage depth and drift and is a type of fishing that rewards rapid response and efficiency. Time saved picking up line between drifts, getting fish onto reels faster, and shortening the length of a fight adds up over the course of the day, allowing recreational anglers to catch more fish and competitive anglers to score more points. In Europe, where euronymphing is quite popular, semi-automatic reel brands such as Vivarelli, Peux Fulgor, and JMC are in common use and in high demand. In the US, where euronymphing is still building momentum, they are only recently becoming a sought-after item—something OCR hopes to capitalize on.
To test the the Bighorn reel in this capacity I used it on a number of different trout and carp rivers in Washington State, Idaho, Montana, and Utah. Once I got used to holding and managing line with one hand instead of two, I fell in love with the reel for tightline nymphing. Where an automatic reel is all-or-nothing, you can feather the long handle of the Bighorn and take up as much or as little slack as needed. Doing so the reel and rod drop away and become an extension of your hand, enhancing and improving the fishing experience. When you hook a fish, it’s trivial to take up what little slack you haven’t already, and the Bighorn’s drag is sufficient for whatever you’re likely to find in a river. Hooking large (20”+) trout and a few carp got me wondering about how the reel would do with larger species and with streamers. So, despite the reel not really being intended for it I
Tested on Salmon.
When streamer fishing, staying tight to your fly and managing thin sinking lines can be challenging. In Washington State we are blessed to not only have large fish in our rivers, but also along our approximately 28,000 miles of coastline. To target salmon, we often employ thin sinking lines which, especially when wading, can become a tangled mess of slack as you cast out and strip your fly back to you. The lever-action of OCR’s Bighorn allowed me to easily manage my line and the drag was more than enough to land a rather-angry 18-lb Chinook salmon. Though the reel was designed with river fishing and smaller fish in mind, I was happy with its performance until misfortune struck the first sour-note of my experience with the reel.
Coho salmon are somewhat notorious for waiting until a beach angler has stripped their line and some of their leader back into their rod tip before striking a fly and peeling off line. On one beach fishing trip I was pushing the lever to strip the last bit of line and leader in before I moved locations when a coho struck my fly. On the Bighorn reel there is a direct connection between drag and lever-retrieve, so when the fish grabbed the fly as I pumped the lever the whole system locked up, then the handle bent in the middle to about a 45-degree angle in line with the rod.
The reel and drag themselves continued to function perfectly, so I was able to land the fish (9.7 lbs), and bend the handle back almost to its original appearance, but I was dismayed at what seemed to be a design flaw or oversight. When I reached out to Tony Nevshemal at OCR, he explained that the alloy choice on the handle is designed to be a sacrificial part that takes any strain and bends in order to protect the rest of the gears and drag. In other words, when a reel locks up something has to give, and OCR would rather it be the easily-replaced reel handle than a more catastrophic failure of drag which would completely disable the reel and, worse, probably cost you your fish. Having come out of the experience with the reel more-or-less unscathed, or perhaps slightly scathed but still fully functional, I decided to test it out on stillwater fishing. So I
Tested from a Canoe.
In a canoe, line management looks a lot different from other fisheries—or at least it does when I do it. Whether slowly hand-retrieving chironomids or stripping-in streamers, it’s really about keeping your slack from tangling on things in the boat or rapidly retrieving it all when it’s time to relocate to a more likely spot. I appreciated the ability to do so, but it felt like a complete luxury and not as important to fishing as it had when I was stripping streamers. The ease of management with only one hand, though, got me to thinking about folks with disabilities or for whom fishing with one hand might be the only way. So, I reached out to a friend who works with Project Healing Waters, an organization that introduces or reintroduces wounded veterans to fly fishing. According to him, hand and arm injuries are some of the most common that afflict wounded veterans and after much testing and discussion, he concluded that the Bighorn is a reel that would be
Helpful to Those with Disabilites.
If you’ve got limited use of one or both hands, this reel may very well be your ticket to fly fishing. The reel seat has a sliding adjustment (more on that later) that can help tailor the fit of the reel to your hand, and the long handle and the ease with which line can be retrieved single-handedly means that even those with limited use of the one hand could strip in flies and pick up slack where a conventional reel would leave them completely unable to fish. Usually Project Healing Waters uses and suggests spring-loaded reels for these folks, but the springs are often fairly weak and tend to be problematic—especially to control the rate of retrieval.
What’s New:
+ The reel has an adjustable foot allowing you to customize where it balances on your rod and where the handle falls into your hand. This adujstable foot does allow a tiny bit of play into the reel to rod connection, but nothing you’re going to notice unless you go looking for it and it won’t affect your ability to fight fish.
+ Unlike other semi-automatic fly reels, the Bighorn has a line guide. This moves the line out of the way of the lever, helps prevent tangles, and lets you control your drift and depth with a single hand.
+ Where other brands have exposed gears or drags that have to be adjusted with wrenches, the Bighorn’s sealed drag can be adjusted smoothly and easily with the turn of a knob.
+ Compared to the Vivarelli and Peux Fulgor I have tested in the past, the Bighorn seems far more durable and able to handle a wider range of line weights. At 7.38 ounces it’s also better able to balance the long nymphing rods you’re likely to pair it with.
What Works:
+ The OCR Bighorn is a beautiful reel and from the moment you open the box and see the custom Wyoming-wool reel sock and biodegradable packaging you know you’re in for a unique and thought-out fly fishing experience.
+ The anodizing on the reel is durable and reists scratches and rash well.
+ The reel has an adjustable foot allowing you to customize where it sits on your rod and where the handle falls into your hand. It’s cool for any type of fishing, but fantastic for tight-line/euronymphing. If they have anything at all, the other nymphing reels out there have fiddly weights that you have to put on and take off—often requiring disassembly of the reel. OCR’s implementation here is instant, easy, and great. This adujstable foot does allow a tiny bit of play into the reel to rod connection, but nothing you’re going to notice unless you go looking for it.
+ Though the reel has a smaller arbor the line retrieve is far faster than any traditional fly reel I’ve ever seen, retrieving up to 50” per squeeze of the lever when you get it up to speed. Even a slow single squeeze will get you 10”. In a speed test I was able to pull 90’ of 5wt line and 10’ of leader/tippet out of the water and onto the reel in under 10 seconds. For comparison, a “normal” fly reel took me four times longer and wan’t nearly as smooth or elegant in doing so.
+ Line management, especially when tightline nymphing, is unmatched by traditional reels.
+ Smooth drag with no measurable startup inertia and measured 0 to 4.5 lbs of usable drag strength over the course of one turn of the drag knob. This is comprable to the drag strength of many 8wt reels like Loop’s Opti Speedrunner, Einarsson’s 8Plus, and Lamson’s Litespeed. Considering how hard it is to actually put 4.5 lbs of pull onto a reel when fighting a fish, this is more than enough for all manner of freshwater fish and many saltwater ones. For perspective, Hatch’s Finatic reels, renowned for catching tarpon and other saltwater giants, top out at 5.5 lbs of drag.
+ The reel is a full-cage design, meaning you can fish mono rigs and other small diameter lines without fear of them escaping and jamming your reel.
+ Micarta handles offer very good grip even when they’re wet and your hands are slimy from fish.
+ OCR’s reels are made in the USA with materials from the USA.
What Doesn’t Work:
- The handle bent on me when I was fighting a fish. Yes, it’s not meant to haul in a fish for you and you should use the handles to fight the fish once it’s on the reel but, as my experience demonstrated, there will come a time when a fish takes line while you are taking in the last bit of slack with the lever and putting the fish onto the reel. With a trout on the end of the reel, this probably wouldn’t have been a problem. With a salmon it meant that one pull was enough to bend the lever until it touched the cork on my rod. I was able to land the fish and straighten the reel handle, but for the rest of my time fishing the reel it was in the back of my mind.
- At 1” in diameter, the drag knob is very small and not something that is easy to adjust during a fight. Considering many folks set their drag once and leave it alone, this may not be an issue for you.
- The arbor of the reel is small (inner diameter 1.75”) but I was only able to get 80 yards of 20lb dacron backing on it and still have room for a 7wt sinking line. Some folks may balk at this on a 7wt reel, but I don’t recall ever having a freshwater fish taking me even 50 yards into my backing. This low capacity is partly because the outer diameter of the reel is a small 3 3/16”. This is largely mitigated by the fact that if you use the lever you are picking up a ton of line very quickly. Speaking of reeling in line…
- The reel has two micarta handles which, while easy to grip when wet, wolloped my knuckles when I went to reel in line during a fight with a salmon.
- This is a “left-hand” retrieve reel and there is no offering for right-hand retrieve. Like the reel diameter, this is mostly not a problem as you are expected to pick up line using the semi-automatic handle.
- Though the reel has a line guide that you can rotate to somewhat control where line is fed onto the spool, line tends to stack up on one side when you retrieve it with the lever. If you’ve maxed out the backing and line capacity of the reel, as I did with a 7wt sinking line, this may cause the line to jam the reel. With a traditional reel, or with one of the semi-automatic reel brands that lack the line guide it’s easy for your left hand to distribute line evenly across the spool, but with the line guide installed you cannot do this. With a tightline nymphing rig, smaller-weight lines, or at usual trout-distances you probably won’t run into this problem at all.
- On a few occasions the line guide worked itself loose from its seat and was in danger of fouling the line in the rod stripping guide. A bit of teflon tape prevented this for me, though if I’d had it Locktite might’ve been a more permanent solution.
Things to Note:
= The strength of the semi-automatic retrieve depends on the strength of the drag setting. When you have a lot of line out, especially with sinking line and a big streamer in current, you will want to consider maxing out the drag to increase the speed and strength of the retrieve.
= The Bighorn is marketed as a 3-7wt reel, but I don’t know that I can recommend chasing salmon or other large fish with it like you might another 7wt reel. If you think of this as a freshwater 7wt, it will serve you very well.
= There are other semi-automatic fly reels out there. OCR didn’t invent this type of reel, but are offering their own spin on it. Franco Vivarelli, an Italian company, and JMC, a French company, makes some of the most well-known semi-automatic reels at a variety of price points between $250 and $1000 USD. Neither company, though, offers one with adjustable foot, sealed drag, or line guide.
= This is a $900 USD reel. Some may balk at that price, but the best tightline nymphing rods I’ve tested (T&T Contact II and Sage ESN) are at or above that same price. For those who spend more time nymphing and will appreciate the advantages this particular reel confers, the price may well be worth it.
Recommendations:
So, is the Bighorn a groundbreaking innovation or an overpriced niche product? It depends on your fishing style and budget. With its full cage, adjustable balance point, and easy to control one-handed retrieve, for dedicated nymphers or anglers with disabilities it could be a game-changer. The semi-automatic action is fantastic for easily picking up line in a hurry, speeding up fights with fish, upping your nymphing efficiency and ultimately getting you more fish per session. I fished the reel for everything I could target in saltwater and fresh, lakes, ponds, and rivers, and it will do it all, but the methods that most benefit from this style of reel is nymphing in rivers or feathering the lever as you slowly crawl chironomids to the surface of a lake.
The reel could also be a huge boon to those with limited use of their hand(s), with the one caveat that often times these folks, like the veterans Project Healing Waters helps, have a limited income that puts a $900 reel, however helpful, a bit out of reach.
Would I Buy It?
If I mostly tightline nymphed, I would strongly consider it. While the Bighorn's ability to instantly control line and depth is undeniably impressive, especially for tightline nymphing, it doesn't quite fit my personal fishing style. As a streamer fisherman, I spend most of my time stripping and swinging flies, where the benefits of the semi-automatic feature are less pronounced. Additionally, the left-hand-only configuration doesn't align with my preferred right-hand-retrieval style.
Ultimately, the Bighorn's value hinges on your specific needs and budget. For those seeking a versatile reel for a wide range of techniques, it might be an expensive niche product. However, for dedicated nymphers, competitive anglers, or folks with limited hand mobility, it could be worth every penny.
A NOTE ABOUT INTEGRITY:
OCR sent me the fly reel for review, but at the end of the review the reel went straight back to them without my receiving even so much as a sticker. All photos and words are my own, as are the opinions. Your own might vary and I encourage you to check out the reel for yourself if, like I was, you are curious about it and want to form your own opinions. Should I decide to purchase a copy of the reel, I will do so in the same manner as anyone else--through OCR directly or one of the shops that carries the reels (at time of writing that appears to be Tactical Fly Fisher).
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me or the folks at OCR who are excited about their product and are quick to respond to questions about this interesting reel.
Aside from newer materials replacing old ones, and the Victorians inventing khakis, fly fishing fundamentals have remained relatively unchanged for centuries. Because anglers and fish haven’t evolved significantly, truly groundbreaking advancements are hard to come-by and rare. The same fly patterns, rods, and reels that caught fish a hundred years ago still catch fish today. To sell new items every year in a saturated market, established brands tempt customers with new color schemes, new marketing buzzwords, or incremental and sometimes dubious advancements of existing products. Rarely do they offer something truly new. New is risky, so revolution is left to newcomers who seek to disrupt the status quo and carve a niche for themselves.
OCR Fly Reels of Buffalo, Wyoming, is one such company seeking to improve the fly fishing experience with their innovative American-made semi-automatic Bighorn Fly Reel. But, is it innovation or a gimmick?
Semi-automatic What Now?
In the 1950s and 60s, one attempted innovation were spring-loaded automatic fly reels. For anglers who handline their fish, these were an interesting idea. A lever held under the pinky, when activated, released a spring that spun the reel spool rapidly, sucking up slack and easily getting you tight to your fish. Though you can still buy them, in practice spring-action reels are finnicky and difficult to load, service, change lines, and use—something familiar to anyone who has fought a vacuum’s power cord or a zinger tool retractor that stops zinging.
With a semi-automatic fly reel, there is far less to go wrong as there is no spring. Instead, the lever engages a gear or gears that spin the reel spool. The more and faster you pump the lever, the more line gets spooled onto the reel and the faster it does so. In practice, I was able to get the spool to turn four or five turns for every pump. When I first held OCR’s Bighorn Fly Reel at the 2024 Fly Fishing Show in Bellevue, WA, I could envision several scenarios aside from handlining where the ability to rapidly manage slack with one hand would be a massive advantage.
A Boon for Euronymphers.
Over the last several years competitive fly anglers and pundits like Joe Humphreys (https://hhd.psu.edu/kines/undergraduate/joe-humphreys-fly-fishing-program), Devin Olsen (https://tacticalflyfisher.com) and Dom Swentosky (https://www.troutbitten.com) have popularized what is variously known as Czech-nymphing, tightline nymphing, and euronymphing. Whatever you call it, success requires the angler to keep their line tight to the nymph and manage depth and drift and is a type of fishing that rewards rapid response and efficiency. Time saved picking up line between drifts, getting fish onto reels faster, and shortening the length of a fight adds up over the course of the day, allowing recreational anglers to catch more fish and competitive anglers to score more points. In Europe, where euronymphing is quite popular, semi-automatic reel brands such as Vivarelli, Peux Fulgor, and JMC are in common use and in high demand. In the US, where euronymphing is still building momentum, they are only recently becoming a sought-after item—something OCR hopes to capitalize on.
To test the the Bighorn reel in this capacity I used it on a number of different trout and carp rivers in Washington State, Idaho, Montana, and Utah. Once I got used to holding and managing line with one hand instead of two, I fell in love with the reel for tightline nymphing. Where an automatic reel is all-or-nothing, you can feather the long handle of the Bighorn and take up as much or as little slack as needed. Doing so the reel and rod drop away and become an extension of your hand, enhancing and improving the fishing experience. When you hook a fish, it’s trivial to take up what little slack you haven’t already, and the Bighorn’s drag is sufficient for whatever you’re likely to find in a river. Hooking large (20”+) trout and a few carp got me wondering about how the reel would do with larger species and with streamers. So, despite the reel not really being intended for it I
Tested on Salmon.
When streamer fishing, staying tight to your fly and managing thin sinking lines can be challenging. In Washington State we are blessed to not only have large fish in our rivers, but also along our approximately 28,000 miles of coastline. To target salmon, we often employ thin sinking lines which, especially when wading, can become a tangled mess of slack as you cast out and strip your fly back to you. The lever-action of OCR’s Bighorn allowed me to easily manage my line and the drag was more than enough to land a rather-angry 18-lb Chinook salmon. Though the reel was designed with river fishing and smaller fish in mind, I was happy with its performance until misfortune struck the first sour-note of my experience with the reel.
Coho salmon are somewhat notorious for waiting until a beach angler has stripped their line and some of their leader back into their rod tip before striking a fly and peeling off line. On one beach fishing trip I was pushing the lever to strip the last bit of line and leader in before I moved locations when a coho struck my fly. On the Bighorn reel there is a direct connection between drag and lever-retrieve, so when the fish grabbed the fly as I pumped the lever the whole system locked up, then the handle bent in the middle to about a 45-degree angle in line with the rod.
The reel and drag themselves continued to function perfectly, so I was able to land the fish (9.7 lbs), and bend the handle back almost to its original appearance, but I was dismayed at what seemed to be a design flaw or oversight. When I reached out to Tony Nevshemal at OCR, he explained that the alloy choice on the handle is designed to be a sacrificial part that takes any strain and bends in order to protect the rest of the gears and drag. In other words, when a reel locks up something has to give, and OCR would rather it be the easily-replaced reel handle than a more catastrophic failure of drag which would completely disable the reel and, worse, probably cost you your fish. Having come out of the experience with the reel more-or-less unscathed, or perhaps slightly scathed but still fully functional, I decided to test it out on stillwater fishing. So I
Tested from a Canoe.
In a canoe, line management looks a lot different from other fisheries—or at least it does when I do it. Whether slowly hand-retrieving chironomids or stripping-in streamers, it’s really about keeping your slack from tangling on things in the boat or rapidly retrieving it all when it’s time to relocate to a more likely spot. I appreciated the ability to do so, but it felt like a complete luxury and not as important to fishing as it had when I was stripping streamers. The ease of management with only one hand, though, got me to thinking about folks with disabilities or for whom fishing with one hand might be the only way. So, I reached out to a friend who works with Project Healing Waters, an organization that introduces or reintroduces wounded veterans to fly fishing. According to him, hand and arm injuries are some of the most common that afflict wounded veterans and after much testing and discussion, he concluded that the Bighorn is a reel that would be
Helpful to Those with Disabilites.
If you’ve got limited use of one or both hands, this reel may very well be your ticket to fly fishing. The reel seat has a sliding adjustment (more on that later) that can help tailor the fit of the reel to your hand, and the long handle and the ease with which line can be retrieved single-handedly means that even those with limited use of the one hand could strip in flies and pick up slack where a conventional reel would leave them completely unable to fish. Usually Project Healing Waters uses and suggests spring-loaded reels for these folks, but the springs are often fairly weak and tend to be problematic—especially to control the rate of retrieval.
What’s New:
+ The reel has an adjustable foot allowing you to customize where it balances on your rod and where the handle falls into your hand. This adujstable foot does allow a tiny bit of play into the reel to rod connection, but nothing you’re going to notice unless you go looking for it and it won’t affect your ability to fight fish.
+ Unlike other semi-automatic fly reels, the Bighorn has a line guide. This moves the line out of the way of the lever, helps prevent tangles, and lets you control your drift and depth with a single hand.
+ Where other brands have exposed gears or drags that have to be adjusted with wrenches, the Bighorn’s sealed drag can be adjusted smoothly and easily with the turn of a knob.
+ Compared to the Vivarelli and Peux Fulgor I have tested in the past, the Bighorn seems far more durable and able to handle a wider range of line weights. At 7.38 ounces it’s also better able to balance the long nymphing rods you’re likely to pair it with.
What Works:
+ The OCR Bighorn is a beautiful reel and from the moment you open the box and see the custom Wyoming-wool reel sock and biodegradable packaging you know you’re in for a unique and thought-out fly fishing experience.
+ The anodizing on the reel is durable and reists scratches and rash well.
+ The reel has an adjustable foot allowing you to customize where it sits on your rod and where the handle falls into your hand. It’s cool for any type of fishing, but fantastic for tight-line/euronymphing. If they have anything at all, the other nymphing reels out there have fiddly weights that you have to put on and take off—often requiring disassembly of the reel. OCR’s implementation here is instant, easy, and great. This adujstable foot does allow a tiny bit of play into the reel to rod connection, but nothing you’re going to notice unless you go looking for it.
+ Though the reel has a smaller arbor the line retrieve is far faster than any traditional fly reel I’ve ever seen, retrieving up to 50” per squeeze of the lever when you get it up to speed. Even a slow single squeeze will get you 10”. In a speed test I was able to pull 90’ of 5wt line and 10’ of leader/tippet out of the water and onto the reel in under 10 seconds. For comparison, a “normal” fly reel took me four times longer and wan’t nearly as smooth or elegant in doing so.
+ Line management, especially when tightline nymphing, is unmatched by traditional reels.
+ Smooth drag with no measurable startup inertia and measured 0 to 4.5 lbs of usable drag strength over the course of one turn of the drag knob. This is comprable to the drag strength of many 8wt reels like Loop’s Opti Speedrunner, Einarsson’s 8Plus, and Lamson’s Litespeed. Considering how hard it is to actually put 4.5 lbs of pull onto a reel when fighting a fish, this is more than enough for all manner of freshwater fish and many saltwater ones. For perspective, Hatch’s Finatic reels, renowned for catching tarpon and other saltwater giants, top out at 5.5 lbs of drag.
+ The reel is a full-cage design, meaning you can fish mono rigs and other small diameter lines without fear of them escaping and jamming your reel.
+ Micarta handles offer very good grip even when they’re wet and your hands are slimy from fish.
+ OCR’s reels are made in the USA with materials from the USA.
What Doesn’t Work:
- The handle bent on me when I was fighting a fish. Yes, it’s not meant to haul in a fish for you and you should use the handles to fight the fish once it’s on the reel but, as my experience demonstrated, there will come a time when a fish takes line while you are taking in the last bit of slack with the lever and putting the fish onto the reel. With a trout on the end of the reel, this probably wouldn’t have been a problem. With a salmon it meant that one pull was enough to bend the lever until it touched the cork on my rod. I was able to land the fish and straighten the reel handle, but for the rest of my time fishing the reel it was in the back of my mind.
- At 1” in diameter, the drag knob is very small and not something that is easy to adjust during a fight. Considering many folks set their drag once and leave it alone, this may not be an issue for you.
- The arbor of the reel is small (inner diameter 1.75”) but I was only able to get 80 yards of 20lb dacron backing on it and still have room for a 7wt sinking line. Some folks may balk at this on a 7wt reel, but I don’t recall ever having a freshwater fish taking me even 50 yards into my backing. This low capacity is partly because the outer diameter of the reel is a small 3 3/16”. This is largely mitigated by the fact that if you use the lever you are picking up a ton of line very quickly. Speaking of reeling in line…
- The reel has two micarta handles which, while easy to grip when wet, wolloped my knuckles when I went to reel in line during a fight with a salmon.
- This is a “left-hand” retrieve reel and there is no offering for right-hand retrieve. Like the reel diameter, this is mostly not a problem as you are expected to pick up line using the semi-automatic handle.
- Though the reel has a line guide that you can rotate to somewhat control where line is fed onto the spool, line tends to stack up on one side when you retrieve it with the lever. If you’ve maxed out the backing and line capacity of the reel, as I did with a 7wt sinking line, this may cause the line to jam the reel. With a traditional reel, or with one of the semi-automatic reel brands that lack the line guide it’s easy for your left hand to distribute line evenly across the spool, but with the line guide installed you cannot do this. With a tightline nymphing rig, smaller-weight lines, or at usual trout-distances you probably won’t run into this problem at all.
- On a few occasions the line guide worked itself loose from its seat and was in danger of fouling the line in the rod stripping guide. A bit of teflon tape prevented this for me, though if I’d had it Locktite might’ve been a more permanent solution.
Things to Note:
= The strength of the semi-automatic retrieve depends on the strength of the drag setting. When you have a lot of line out, especially with sinking line and a big streamer in current, you will want to consider maxing out the drag to increase the speed and strength of the retrieve.
= The Bighorn is marketed as a 3-7wt reel, but I don’t know that I can recommend chasing salmon or other large fish with it like you might another 7wt reel. If you think of this as a freshwater 7wt, it will serve you very well.
= There are other semi-automatic fly reels out there. OCR didn’t invent this type of reel, but are offering their own spin on it. Franco Vivarelli, an Italian company, and JMC, a French company, makes some of the most well-known semi-automatic reels at a variety of price points between $250 and $1000 USD. Neither company, though, offers one with adjustable foot, sealed drag, or line guide.
= This is a $900 USD reel. Some may balk at that price, but the best tightline nymphing rods I’ve tested (T&T Contact II and Sage ESN) are at or above that same price. For those who spend more time nymphing and will appreciate the advantages this particular reel confers, the price may well be worth it.
Recommendations:
So, is the Bighorn a groundbreaking innovation or an overpriced niche product? It depends on your fishing style and budget. With its full cage, adjustable balance point, and easy to control one-handed retrieve, for dedicated nymphers or anglers with disabilities it could be a game-changer. The semi-automatic action is fantastic for easily picking up line in a hurry, speeding up fights with fish, upping your nymphing efficiency and ultimately getting you more fish per session. I fished the reel for everything I could target in saltwater and fresh, lakes, ponds, and rivers, and it will do it all, but the methods that most benefit from this style of reel is nymphing in rivers or feathering the lever as you slowly crawl chironomids to the surface of a lake.
The reel could also be a huge boon to those with limited use of their hand(s), with the one caveat that often times these folks, like the veterans Project Healing Waters helps, have a limited income that puts a $900 reel, however helpful, a bit out of reach.
Would I Buy It?
If I mostly tightline nymphed, I would strongly consider it. While the Bighorn's ability to instantly control line and depth is undeniably impressive, especially for tightline nymphing, it doesn't quite fit my personal fishing style. As a streamer fisherman, I spend most of my time stripping and swinging flies, where the benefits of the semi-automatic feature are less pronounced. Additionally, the left-hand-only configuration doesn't align with my preferred right-hand-retrieval style.
Ultimately, the Bighorn's value hinges on your specific needs and budget. For those seeking a versatile reel for a wide range of techniques, it might be an expensive niche product. However, for dedicated nymphers, competitive anglers, or folks with limited hand mobility, it could be worth every penny.
A NOTE ABOUT INTEGRITY:
OCR sent me the fly reel for review, but at the end of the review the reel went straight back to them without my receiving even so much as a sticker. All photos and words are my own, as are the opinions. Your own might vary and I encourage you to check out the reel for yourself if, like I was, you are curious about it and want to form your own opinions. Should I decide to purchase a copy of the reel, I will do so in the same manner as anyone else--through OCR directly or one of the shops that carries the reels (at time of writing that appears to be Tactical Fly Fisher).
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me or the folks at OCR who are excited about their product and are quick to respond to questions about this interesting reel.
