Penn Clash II 3000 spinning reel review - around £180 here in the UK

I don’t know if many of you here have fished with the original Penn Clash spinning reels, but I was rather taken with them - with what seems to be the regular Penn idiosyncrasies taken into consideration (more on these later). The 3000 size Clash was always my favourite (around the same size as a Shimano 4000, and there is also a new Penn Clash II in the smaller 2500 size, around the same size as a Shimano 3000), so I was really interested to see this newer version, the Penn Clash II 3000. They have been available in the US for a while now I believe, and whilst I have had this Penn Clash II 3000 here since March of this year, only now are they starting to appear in UK shops and on various fishing tackle websites. You either like Penn spinning reels or you don’t I guess, and whilst around £180 buys you a hell of a lot of very smooth spinning reel in the Shimano Stradic 4000XG-FL (if you can find them in stock mind you, and I am assuming this particular size Stradic is as lovely to fish with as the smaller 2500 version which continues to be sublime), it also buys you this rather nice Penn Clash II 3000……………

We need to get the Penn idiosyncrasies out of the way before we go any further though. I can’t recall using a Shimano spinning reel which I haven’t been able to fill right up with braid and then had to worry about wind knots if I did so, but this is not the case with the various Penn spinning reels I have used over the last few years. You need to underfill them, and you need to know the line levels at which you won’t get any line issues. This either bothers you or it doesn’t, and whilst I have never had much cause to believe that my lures aren’t going out quite as far on a Penn spinning reel when compared to a Shimano - I personally believe that casting distances are far more down to the angler and how they cast than a few extra yards of line on a reel - it’s something that an angler who is going to be casting lures instead of dropping baits and lures down vertically off a boat needs to know about (you are obviously not going to get a fishing tackle company saying hang on customer, remember to allow for a few idiosyncrasies with our gear). I also can’t recall having to fiddle with the line lay washers in any of my Shimano spinning reels because they give me a perfect line lay right out of the box, but this is not the case with a lot of the Penn reels, indeed it’s a bit of a lottery as to what shape of line lay you get out of the box, and then how you might need to adjust the washers accordingly (instructions on how to do so are always included with their reels). I had to take some washers out of this particular Penn Clash II 3000 to get what I would call a good line lay. This obviously involves a bit of trial and error, and if I didn’t have a very fast way of getting line off reels - drill, drill bit, big empty mono spool - I’d be far less inclined to allow for this.

Do these idiosyncrasies matter though when you are getting spinning reels like the Penn Slammer III 3500 and 4500 reels which I simply couldn’t do without because of how they take so much saltwater on board and keep on going? There’s my answer. I’ll take the various idiosyncrasies because I want what some of the Penn spinning reels can do for me in hectic saltwater environments especially, and whilst I don’t understand why such a big fishing tackle company doesn’t work on ironing these issues out, none of them are deal-breakers for me. I know about them, I know how to overcome them, and I tend to like Penn spinning reels when they are doing what the Slammers and Spinfishers can do for me. Penn is a huge fishing tackle brand in the US, and in their saltwater world there is a hell of a lot of dropping live and dead baits straight down from a boat so various casting related issues potentially don’t matter as much.

My understanding is that this Clash II is a bit of a different reel to the Slammer and Spinfisher though. The Penn USA website states that the Clash II range of spinning reels is the “ultimate inshore reel”, and to those of you who aren’t aware, this is a huge sector of the market in the US fishing scene. We are talking about inshore boat fishing for a wide variety of species, and many of them grow far bigger and fight far harder than our own glorious bass. The Clash II I believe is meant to be a very refined and lightweight but typically tough Penn spinning reel, and whilst there are some saltwater protection elements in there (Hydrophobic Line Roller Bearing and Clutch Armor System, not entirely sure what they are but they sound nice), they don’t have various IPX water resistant ratings like on the Slammer III and Spinfisher VI spinning reels. Judging by the heavier weights of those particular reels compared to these new, lightweight Clash II reels, I am guessing that including the necessary components to get these IPX ratings adds weight and bulk to a reel.

So what have we got with this rather smart looking and lightweight (311g loaded with braid) Penn Clash II 3000 spinning reel? Well I seriously like lure fishing with it. I like the chunky and very grippy handle, I like how smooth, refined, powerful and workmanlike it feels, I like how smooth the drag feels although I am not really worried about spinning reel drags very much when fishing for our bass, and I like how this reel feels so good on a bunch of different 9’ and 9’6’’ lure rods. It’s not a reel to take out in the surf, so at the price I have to put it up against something like the Shimano Stradic 4000XG-FL which as I said about I haven’t seen or fished with, but I have enough time with its smaller 2500 sibling to know that this Stradic FL range of spinning reels is pretty damn serious. I get the impression that many anglers are either in the Shimano or Daiwa or Penn or whatever reels camps, and I do wonder if you’re going to get a “Shimano spinning reel angler” moving over to this Penn Clash II spinning reel, and would a “Penn spinning reel angler” move over to Shimano or Daiwa reels? And so on.

If you’re in the market for a very good spinning reel around the Shimano 4000 size then I’d implore you to have a think about this Penn Clash II 3000 - if you allow for those idiosyncrasies. I did start fishing with this reel earlier in the year and I was loving it (with that first lockdown taken into account of course), but then out of the blue I got a really bad wind knot and to be honest it pissed me off because I didn’t think I had remotely overloaded it. I left the reel alone for a while after that, but then I gave myself a talking to, adjusted the line level to what you see above, and it’s been problem-free ever since. I was under no obligation to come back to this Penn Clash II 3000 by the way, but it was simply a case of the reel feeling very right on a few lure rods, plus it’s just a really nice and confidence inspiring reel to fish with. It turns as smoothly as the Shimano reels I am so used to, it feels more refined and “precision” than the (awesome) Penn Slammers and Spinfishers, and at 311g loaded up with line this Penn Clash II 3000 is about the same weight as the quoted weight of the Shimano Stradic 4000XG-FL at 280g which doesn’t include putting line on of course.

I’m not sure if this review has told you much that you probably couldn’t have guessed about this Penn Clash II 3000, other than I have fished with it a fair amount and for whatever reason it’s a spinning reel which I really like. I can’t imagine this Penn Clash II 3000 is doing anything more for me than the Shimano Stradic 4000XG-FL would if I had been fishing with that similar size reel (Penn idiosyncrasies aside), and at such a similar price I guess what an angler chooses to buy comes down to different factors - what you are used to, availability, what sort of deal can you find, whether the bloody things are ever actually in stock or not, what your local tackle shop might stock, what other anglers are talking about, what anglers you might fish with are using, and so on. Some reels appeal to me more than others, and often for reasons which I can’t really explain unless there’s a specific reason such as the “drown me as much as you like and I just keep on getting smoother” thing with the Slammer III 3500, so here’s me saying to you kind readers that this smart looking and very smooth feeling Penn Clash II 3000 spinning reel floats my boat. How about that for a Monday morning after such a truly dreadful weekend of weather?

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