Thread: Penn Surfmaster 250

Going through some of my Dads stuff out in his shop a couple of weeks ago and ran across a couple of old reels he had gotten before he passed at an auction or yard sale or somewhere. The man was a pack rat and loved hunting and fishing and anything hunting and fishing related. Well curiosity got the better of me and I brought one of the reels home. A saltwater fishing guy I work with took one look at the reel and said it was an early 70's Penn. The stickers on it are long gone but he mostly knows his stuff. So giving him the benefit of the doubt I then went to google and began a search based on just what I knew from him. One site identified the type of reel and the next one told me to look on the plate where it attaches to the rod where I found it stamped "250" using that info I found it was/is a Surfmaster 250. The only difference in it and the ones I found online was instead of having the handle with a "T" like an old Hurst shifter this one has one shaped like a bell. At a going price of $25 to $35.00 I think I'm going to honor the old man by cleaning this thing up mounting it to a legit rod and doing some war on the pier with it this year.
My question is what rod and line do you recommend?

It's gonna hold a TON of 30# mono, but that would be a good match.
I'd put it on a 7 or 8 foot medium heavy action rod (vintage perhaps) or even something like the Daiwa Beefstick.
Use a BIG float (or balloon) and swim out live hardtails, spanish sardines, threadfin herring, or mullet and hang on!

;-)

I hope someone in my family does that with my old stuff(fishing & hunting) after I am gone, keeping them alive and catching fish or bringing meat home from the woods.

Well 30# on a vintage looking rod in the 7-8 ft.league it shall be.I will have it ready when I make my first pier run of the summer in a couple of weeks or so.

Good luck finding a vintage 7 to 8 footer. If you drop down to a 6.5 or even 6 your search may be easier. There are plenty solid glass rods with wooden handles in the shorter range. Ocean City and True Temper are two brands I recall.

If I was looking for vintage looking unit what would/should I look for? I appreciate the time yall are taking answering my questions. Salt water/surf/pier fishing is not my area of expertise. Heck it's not even my in my zip code of expertise.

Wild, I think you might be holding an EARLY Penn reel. Two things lead me to believe this. One being the handle. Sounds like it is a wooden handle and those are from the late 40's. They started making plastic handles in the early 50's. Now can't say for sure if the handle is original to the reel but I am thinking it is due to second factor. Penn also started marking part #'s in the early 50's and since this one only has a 250 on the reel foot shows it is older. If it were from the later dates it would have 30-200 stamped on the foot.

Hmmmm this requires me to figger out how to upload some pics for you to eyeball for me. I don't want to mess up a collectors item. Because the handle is wood.

penn 1.jpgpenn 2.jpg I'm not too good at this whole uploading pictures thing. I'm an analog man forced to live in this digital world. Anyway here are two. why the other two won't upload is beyond me. Click them to enlarge.

That doesn't look like a Penn to me. An Ocean City reel would be my guess. Put the emphasis on guess since I'm no expert.