I have a pair of electric scottys. What I like about them is the automatic shut off when it gets up to the surface, You can adjust where it stops. Keeps my hands free to reel in the pole when you get a fish on to get it out of the way. Its like doing two things a once. A couple of things I would suggest is get one of those green bungies they sell to put inbetween the ball and your line. This allows some stretch and takes the shock out of your downrigger line if you hit bottom. Second I got a bunch of halibut clips to attach your releases to the downrigger cable. If you try to attach the swivel to the ball or cable clip it gets all twisted up. Learned that lesson the hard way. Third I went to 15 pound downrigger balls this way you can get strait down even at faster trolling speeds. If you go to the scottyusa.com site and look around you will find a link to using downriggers they have a chart showing the different weights and how much speed affects them . You can compensate for the speeds with diffent weights but I wanted to take the guess work out of it. I picked mine up for just under $300.00 US apiece from berrysbait.com and that included shipping. They came with the scotty released witch work fine but I have picked up a couple of offshore released and like them better. They seem to release smoother .