The last month or two have been feeling anything but fishy at my place.

The Olympics were great watching and my vinyl collection has been growing worryingly fast, but there has been unusually little fishing-related activity.

The seemingly never-ending series of cold fronts blowing across the South-West have meant I haven’t even looked like actually going for a fish, and I’d normally have been getting ready for an upcoming trip to the Mackerel Islands on our Western Angler Seafari.

However, I packed for an earlier trip to the Mackerels a couple of months ago and it got cancelled due to poor weather, so that gear has simply stayed in the same spot in the boat since.

What this frustrating period of fishing inactivity has done is give me a chance to do a few things in the shed that I’d been putting off.

One of those was getting a few well-worn reels serviced.

Most of my reels are Shimanos, mainly Stellas and Stradics, and over the years they have served me unbelievably well.

I am far from a pedant when it comes to gear maintenance and most times I just give them a quick rinse with fresh water after use and that’s about it.

Unlike some other brands I’ve used they’ve held up well – one Stella has even survived an extended swim when it fell out of my kayak and took me quite some time to find it again.

However, all good things must come to an end and several years of constant use (some would say abuse) a few were starting to feel a bit rough and grindy in their actions, so it was time for a service.

Normally I wouldn’t send more than one reel away at a time because of the need to use them, but the run of bad weather offered a perfect opportunity to get them all done at once.

I sent four reels off to Shimano HQ in Sydney, pulled out some back up reels to fill the hole if required, and assumed I wouldn’t get them back for a couple of months.

I was most surprised when the reels returned only a couple of weeks later, and at a most reasonable price.

Great customer service and a far cry from another company, who dragged the heels for months on a couple of reasonably expensive reels, falsely claiming they’d been for a swim, and then charged through the roof for one while refusing to repair the other.

The proof is in the pudding though and most pleasing of all is that these reels feel like new again and are ready for several more years of work around WA.

They are as smooth as they were out of the box when new, and maybe even better since this latest service.

Not bad for a bunch of reels that are all at least five or six years old.

It feels good to be primed for the Mackerel Islands with a full arsenal of reels back at my disposal, thanks to the good work of Shimano.

Caption: When they see this sort of action regularly, it’s not surprising Scott’s reels eventually need a service.