deep

If you haven't already, try the last 4 digits of your phone number, i.e if your number is xxx-yyy-abcd, try punching "abcd".

I hope you find one of the old cork-grip Compres, which is what I have (or a Crucial). Shimano phased them out, and I don't think the newer Compres are out yet. Mojos are good rods too from what I hear. So are the St Croix Premiers. Plenty of options for your price range. Hang around for the other folks to chime in. You'll have a ton of good advice. The best part is you will actually be able to hold and store-fish the rods you wanna check out, which is not an option for some people, including me. Good luck!

Interesting. If it works for you, that's all that matters. I was wondering about the "reconditioning" process though. Do they just chop off the broken tip and put on new guides? And if they do that off an extra-fast or a fast rod, all that's left is the backbone; isn't it? Not a criticism, I'm just trying to figure out the actual process and how it affects the "action" of the rod.

The set-up I use for those purposes, my friend, is a 7' MH/F Shimano Compre with a Shimano Citica 201E spooled with 12 lb Sufix Siege. Best $230 I ever spent; I bought everything at full retail. I got a dedicated cranking rod, and most of my finesse fishing is done with a higher end spinning rig. The Compre-Citica fishes the topwaters and rattletraps mostly, and occasionally spinnerbaits and heavier casting jigs.

The Citica E is the best bang for your buck for sub-$100 reels. The BPS pro-qualifier is a close second. IMO of course.

Bantam Curados are the old greenies. Slightly heavier than the new E's, but they come in all gear ratios, for RH and LH retrieves. And they are good reels. You can buy a used one, super-tune it, and still have some cash left over, and have a comparable reel to the stock Curado E, or better. I saw a post somewhere that even today, a few pros use them. So do you want a RH or an LH reel? Honestly, if you want a new/ newish Curado E, look around. Mr Franchot had two NIB Curado E's for $80 each shipped a month ago. P.S. looks like RH reels cost more than LH ones. Good thing I use leftys. Much have saved a bunch of money down the road, and not even realized it EDIT: PM sent.

I think a 6.3:1 is a more all-around gear ratio. Do the RH curado Es come in that ratio? (I use lefty reels only). Otherwise, the 200E7 is just fine. I think it picks up 3 or 4 inches of more line per turn. Not a big deal, just reel a wee bit slower. If you're set on a Curado, I'd tell you to look for good condition used bantam curados. Those are some serious reels. I bought another one last week; and you can save 30 to 40 bucks (at least).

Sounds like a good deal!

Curado wins! P.S. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, lol. I own 5 shimano baitcasters, I have 5 baitcasters. I guess there's a reason for that though

I've fished Bantam Curados, Curado E's, Bantam Citicas, Citica E's. I've also fished Revo STXs, and Revo Winches. Even if I were unbiased, I'd take a Citica over a Revo SX any day. Curado vs Revo SX? No contest at all.

Yes, bass don't care about price tags. BUT, a moderately expensive ($150+) rod is usually way more sensitive than a cheaper rod ($50 rods like Abu Vendetta, BPS house rods etc). What that means is you can detect more bites and set hooks on more bass that you wouldn't have otherwise caught. People generally use a more sensitive rod for stationary techniques, like jigs and worms, and a less sensitive rod for moving baits, like cranks, spinnerbaits etc. For the later, more sensitivity may actually be counterproductive, since by setting the hook too soon, you're taking the bait away from the fish before he can engulf it. A M/MH power F action is supposedly, and I endorse this theory, a good all-around bass rod. It's neither ideal for jigs, nor for crankbaits, but it will do both jobs. And if you ever decide to get an extra-fast rod for jigs, and a medium/ slow rod for cranks, you can always use you fast action rod for spinnerbaits (moving single hook baits) or texas-rigged plastics etc... P.S. Went through the entire thread, and I agree with the posts. With $200+, you can get one decent baitcasting combo. I'd buy a general purpose (fast action, power depends on the size of lure) rod with that money, and that should work very well with your topwaters and spinnerbaits, and suffice with the jigging. **** I've been told spinning rod and reels are the finesse set-ups but then I see KVD using Baitcasters reels and rods for finesse fishing??**** No, no, and no. Finesse fishing does not mean what bait you're throwing, but how you're moving it (presentation). Turns out that a lot of guys like to throw tiny baits on spinning gear, and guess what sort of baits gets dead-sticked, shaken or crawled on the bottom most often? Those little plastics, jigs and shakey-heads. So technically you can finesse fish a 5 oz bait on a 25 lb line, which is precisely what some trophy anglers do out on the west coast; enter the huddleston trout. But I digress. Yes, little 1/8 oz baits can also be thrown on baitcasters, depending on the rod, reel and line. The rod that excels at throwing 1/8 oz baits will have a hard time casting a 1/2 ouncer though. Otherwise, you can always finesse fish a 1/2 ounce jig or a 3/8 oz shakey-head on a baitcaster. Problem solved. You see, it's a whole system. The bass you're trying to catch maybe sitting in a brush in 5 feet of water, but it's not very active. So you might have to coax him into biting. So maybe you want to use a 3/16 oz shakey-head or a weightless worm and keep that bait in front of his face until he bites (or you get tired of it). So now you wanna look at the rods on your deck and see which rod/ set-up will work best with that bait and the cover. Now let's say there are fish on the outside edge of a grass bed in 25 feet of water. If you decide to use a jig, you'll probably want something heavy, like 1/2 oz or more. So you pick up a different setup. Another scenario, bass are schooling and you want to run a crankbait through them; yet another set-up...

I'm not sure why you need something really fancy just for playing movies and using skype. But if an Apple is what you want, go for it. I have a customized Lenovo Ideapad Y550, but then I need a really fast computer for my research (running memory intensive simulations). It cost me only $800 or so two years back, but I got it during a black Friday sale. IMO windows computers pick up more viruses (or it it viri lol) only because way more people use windows than Mac, Linux etc. I have always been a windows user; I do use Linux in my lab sometimes; never had a virus attack. You just need to be careful, and use a good anti-virus/ spyware program.

I'd love to fish a creek like that. Nice fish!

I have a 7' MH/F old-model compre. Great rod. I thought I got a good deal when I bought it at full retail. lol. It was a good deal. It's a true MH. It's my general purpose baitcaster, but mostly I use it for treble hook baits in the 0.5 to 0.75 oz range. Topwaters, rattle-traps etc. Even used it with jigs. You'll love it.

I've never handled the particular rod you have. But if the upper lure weight rating is true, the tip will feel pretty boingy with a ROF 12 6" hudd, limiting you to lob casts. I don't think your retrieve will be affected a lot, since with the swimbaits, the reel does almost all of the work. The real trouble, as I see it, will be during hooksets. Idk if you'll get enough hooksetting power. Maybe you could consider using braid. JM 2 cents.

Two Strike King Wake King Shads and one Spro BBZ Shad sold for $901... An auction too, not a BIN. I was watching the auction for a while, because well, the seller didn't say/ know what the baits were, and I thought I could snag them up for cheap.. LOL Mickey Ellis got some serious catching up to do... http://www.ebay.com/itm/260851283327?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649#ht_500wt_1288

.. on the huddleston website. Get them before they're gone!

Let's give the kid a break, shall we? At least, he's not claiming it weighed 16 lbs 4 ozs, and even if he did, and doing that makes him happy, why not just let it be?

2 "certified" 7 pounders; one on an LC Gunfish, the second on a 6" Spro BBZ jr floater. I caught another that was 25 inches on a 5" senko, but didn't have a scale on me that day. Could have weighed anything from 8 to 13 lbs I've been serious about bass fishing only for the last 2 years though. Small public lakes in Virginia, mostly bank-fishing.

Re: colors/ weedless hudds I never tried the phantom colors. The trout schemes, the perch, and the baby bass ones work pretty well out here. But then, like I said, I never experimented. I like the ROF 12 way more than the ROF 5; maybe because I almost always use them for bottom bouncing. I mostly slow roll them, but I have caught a couple of nice bass ripping them (like a jerkbait) as well. As Bill Siemantel says, your bait is but a tool. How you use that tool is up to you. Only one of the lakes I fish have stocked trout. But bass in other lakes don't seem to mind eating the hudds either. Go ahead and throw that big bait. It might take a while, but you'll stick a big one on it. Good luck!

Dude, swimbaits do NOT work outside of the west coast. Keep throwing those little cranks and plastics. LOL, just kidding. I throw a lot of 6" and 7" swimbaits (not paddletails), including the 6" regular hudds and the weedless hudds. I tend to use the weedless ones more and more these days, primarily because I was sick of losing 15$ baits to snags; one of the lakes I like to fish is full of rocks. The weedless hudd is truly weedless, in fact it's weedless, rock-less, laydown-less, way more so than the mission fish. Weedless Hudd Rigging: well, it comes with a stock jig hook. I fish it like that. Not sure what you mean by "rigging". I fish it on 15 lb yo-zuri hybrid. That's probably not very ideal though; hooksets are a big headache for me sometimes. I'm buying a second swimbait set-up exclusively for the soft swimbaits sometime soon, and I'll put braid on it. That'd help. One useful tip I got, probably from the SBNation forums, is to make a tiny slit behind the hook, near the dorsal fin. Another one is to wait for a second or two before setting the hook, like frog-fishing. Fishing regular and weedless hudds: if you're think you're retrieving slow enough, reel a bit slower still. Hudds are made for bottom-bouncing; crawl it along the bottom slower than you can endure. I haven't got any 8 inchers though; the 8" ROF 0 is a floater of course. I tend to think that they are better during the colder months of the year, due to the tail design. But that's only the accepted viewpoint, and I won't know better until I go out and challenge it. Go out and throw that big bait. The results will surprise you. Hudds have accounted for more "teen" fishes than any other baits. P.S. Get a copy of the "Southern Trout Eaters" DVD if you can. EDIT: If you're looking for info on the 8" hudd rigging, check out the Fish Chris rigging article on BR, and hunt down the Butch Brown method of rigging too. Basically they discard the jig hook, and put on a treble. The jig hook is sufficient for the 6" hudd IMO.

6 lb sufix siege.

It's a topwater. I won't use a weight. 1/8 oz for me is ultralight territory; with 4 lb mono or 2/10 lb braid.

Congratulations!

I've caught fish with a gillplate torn away and hanging loose from some previous catch-and-release. How about that?