Good addition there, Garcia is a good tackle brand. I use Shimano for 99% of all my fishing but the other1% is Garcia. I started out with Garcia and then tried other brands, Quantum, Daiwa, & Shimano. I've sold all my Daiwa's, save one, and all but one Quantum spinning reel. I spent a good sum on Daiwa there for a while, I had a TDZ, Pixy (Yellow 2004), Steez, Zillion HS, Fuego, and an Alphas (Purple). The Alphas is the only reel I kept, my favorite Daiwa by a wide margin, it's good at everything. I haven't fished it in some years now though, it just sits in it's box. It's almost in perfect condition so I just leave it be.
Kind of a funy story about my First Garcia baitcaster. It's an Ambassadeur 5601C. It was my very first baitcasting reel ever. I ordered it through my local tackle shop because they didn't stock left hand reels at the time. I'd had the thing about a week and my fishing buddy suggested we try night fishing. Now a lot of people do that here in the very hottest part of summer so I thought it would be fun to try. We were bass fishing (mind you he nor I knew much about bass fishing at the time, we had just really started to learn) out of his dad's little 17' Bass Tracker with big 1 once Colorado blade spinnerbaits because that's what we were told was the hot bait at the moment. Like I said we were just starting out bass fishing and didn't know much about it so it didn't occur to us we might need a light to see how to re-tie with or pick backlashes. I had only fished with the Ambassadeur a hand full of times so I still wasn't very good with it yet combined with the no light situation lead to me getting a lot of "loops" in my line on the spool. So I wind up and give her a good cast and it has one of the worst backlashes I've ever gotten and the heavy spinnerbait stops suddenly jerking my rod out of my hands and into the water. Like I said no light so I couldn't see where exactly it went in all I knew was my new combo was gone! I was pretty bumbed out over the whole situation so me and my buddy tried to decide what to do about it, we were sitting in 30' of water or so so there would be no diving in after it. 2 weeks later me him and his dad go back to the spot because his dad had retrieved one of his reels before using a 3 way swivel and some heavy weights and the biggest treble hooks he could find and he just cast out and would drag the bottom to see if he could "snag" the rod. We did this for around thirty minutes with no luck, I was sure the combo was gone for good. Right before we were going to give up he got hung in a pretty big tree limb. He struggled to get the limb up and when he did there was my reel and rod tangled up in the limb. It was amazing that I actually retrieved that reel and I still have it to this day. After two weeks in the river it showed very little signs of damage. Some small parts were rusted but nothing real major. Took the reel in to the nearest sertified Garcia repair shop and they had me back in action in no time.
So Garcia reels are alright in my book, hypothetically if Shimano went out of business I would fish Garcia no doubt.
I have a lot of high end fishing gear but I find myself using the lower priced stuff a lot more. There comes a point in fishing reels to me that your return per investment goes way down in a hurry. Now having said that one of my all time favorite and most used reels is a Calcutta TE DC 201. It was the best baitcaster on the market at the time and it cost me to get one but to me it's worth every penny.
Sorry to go on so long fellas, fishing is bar FAR my favorite hobby so I could go on for hours about tackle, techniques, reels & rods, and just general fishing stories.. Have my own little boat now and LOVE to bass fish, going tomorrow as a matter of fact.
you can't go wrong with any Abu!
