By "pick-ups", I mean the assembly that turns round the spool, "picking up" the line and winding it back onto the spool - the bale arm and flier.
On the old Mitchell 300 series, these went the wrong way round, so that you had to either learn to feather the cast with the "nail" side of your finger, or change hands to cast.
They were even worse when float-fishing with the pick-up open (i.e. when trotting), because the line peeled off the spool onto the back of your finger, and when you struck and hooked a fish, the pick-up wouldn't slip round under your finger and take the line smoothly from it, but bashed into your finger and tried to lash it to the spool. While trying o start winding, the fish usually got a bit of slack line and often unhooked itself.
I know some matchmen of the era loved these reels and worked out how to overcome the design flaw, but I never have been able to work out how, or get one of them to talk me step-by-step through the process!
This need to have the line peel off the spool onto the ball, not the nail, of the finger is the reason that there is no such thing as an "ambidextrous" open-faced fixed-spool reel, so both left-hand wind and right-hand wind models ought to be produced.
Sadly, they are not. Manufacturers would rather fight each other for a tiny share of the saturated left-hand-wind market, rather than realise that about ten per cent of their potential market are southpaws who want a proper right-hand wind reel and have nothing except the old Mitchell 207,209, 321 & 325 (only the 209 being of a good build quality); and the old Abu 66x series - all of which have been discontinued for ages.
