fishwizzard

YZH is very thick for it’s rating, what are the diameters of the two lines you were trying?

They are out of production, but I love I my Hyuga 72H for frogs/cover fishing in general. It’s a very powerful rod with a very slow taper so you get the best of both worlds in terms of solid hooksets and a taper that keeps them pinned. The only drawback is that the tip isn’t great for walking frogs but with careful frog selection and/or adding a small snap to the frog’s line tie, it can be made to walk them well enough.

And the occasional time when the plastic rips free of the hook mid-skip is a really good test of how well you’ve trained your thumb.

I agree with @smalljaw67, Fat Impacts are not the best options for trailers as they are quite vulnerable to tail bite-off and have an incredibly aggressive wiggle even at a slower travel speed when you use them as a trailer. For me the Keitechs are best on a light jighead, like 1/8-3/16oz, or nail-weighted. For trailers I prefer the SK Rage Swimmers for durability and action reasons.

One of the best ways to dip your toe in JDM rods is to look for manufacturers who have lines that are offered in both countries. For example the Shimano Poison Adrena and Daiwa Black Label rods are offered in both countries but with a vastly more limited selection available in the US. This way you can generally find reviews on the overall quality of the line, which adds a bit of confidence when buying one of the JDM specific models.

Carry a 4” chunk of broom handle in your tackle kit. Even heavy braid is easily breakable if you can give it a hard pop. People leaving tons of line in the water is my biggest fishing pet peeve, if you can’t figure out how to break it then don’t fish it.

That’s an interesting idea, I use right handed reels and generally cast with two fingers in front of the trigger, with my pointer finger indexed on the blank. I definitely feel like I make vasty shorter casts than most other people as I end up using backing on everything but the most shallow spools and even then I don’t think I’ve ever come close to spoiling myself. I have a measuring wheel and an extreme amount of free time at the moment, I should stake out some distances in the behind my house and see how far I am actually casting. The ZPI PG spool is great though, it seems to cast as well as an RCS 1012sv but with more line capacity and control. When I first got it I filled it with 12lb YZH and I had to deliberately make very hard snap-casts in order to get it to fully blow up. They are stupidly expensive but the urge to try one was too great and I have it paired with an old TDZ that I paid about as much for as the spool cost, so I ended up with an incredible real it still cost me just a little over 300

I would hit up the tar with a hairdryer and try to use a magic eraser to carefully abrade it off, going very slowly to make sure you don’t start digging into the phone.

That and at the extreme high-end of aftermarket spools. I have a ZPI PG that has a fixed inductor and it give an incredible amount of distance and control with even the stiffest fluorocarbon lines, no idea how they did it but it’s one of the best casting spools I have ever used. I do agree that in general, other than for ultralightweight casting, there isn’t a single application where I would prefer a linear-mag brake system to a Magforce or centerfugal system.

I have a pair of GLXs and a pair of Destroyers and I feel like my PA is Absolutely the same class in terms of both sensitivity, build quality, and power/taper balance. I have had a couple of gen 1 XX rods and while they’re pretty close to the three mentioned above, they’re all been slightly less magical feeling. But it’s fairly small difference.

I used the 50 rats a lot and caught a lot of bass, large and small on them. They are a pain in every aspect however. They’re very heavy and chunky to throw witj anything other than swimbait tackle dispite only weighing ~2.5oz, but the ability to walk them in place makes me want to use a lighter rod. I also have my best luck with them casting very close to cover, which is again difficult because of how poorly they cast. The tails also break on me constantly, even a good bass thrashing around with one of his mouth has broken tails on numerous occasions. I started replacing the tails with hot pink trickworms but I’m not convinced they are as effective as you don’t get the clicking noise the stock tails provide. I also use some of the 40 size rats as well but they have their own issues, Mainly not being boyant enough, you have to just crawl them along to keep them on top and I’ve also found they don’t seem to walk as readily as the big ones. The tails also break on them with about the same frequency. Every time I have a tail break in the middle of a good bite and struggle to replace it or cast one into a laydown and lose it I swear that I’ll never buy another, but they are effective enough that I keep going back to them. I did recently picked up a bunch of BD Shellcrackers to try to replace both the 50 and 40 rats with. If SPRO made a “45” inbetween size and used a stronger thread for the tail I would be all over them.

I keep spare spools in my car and occasionally on my person if I’m going on a long hike so I can keep fishing in the event of an oops. I felt like a chump paying 8 bucks for the actual spool holders so I looked around and found some little plastic screw top jars that perfectly fit a 34mm Daiwa spool with enough room for a little foam padding top and bottom. The issue is now I can’t remember where I bought them from, I checked both my Amazon and eBay histories and don’t see them and I cannot figure out where else I would’ve bought them from. But they are out their and at some point I’ll spend an afternoon hunting around again.

I have a new model 783c and loved it as an all-around bank rod. The sensitivity is outstanding and the power/taper balance of the MBR rods make them insanely versatile. However, I never came around liking the ergonomics of the rod. I find the handle to be too long for any kind of tip down or twitching retrieve, which is a shame as the rod is otherwise excellent for flukes and trickworms. I would gladly trade an inch and a half off the butt added back to the working end. I’m also not a big fan of the reel seat, only a very narrow set of the eight or so different reel body-styles I’ve tried on it feel it all comfortable for me, the usual culprit is that my finger is pushed into the lip of the locking collar. The blank is so good that I just dealt with it until this fall when I picked up a Poison Adrena 611M+. It’s very close and power/taper to the 783c but I find it to be vastly more comfortable and maybe even a little more sensitive.

That’s pretty nonsensical that somehow hiking is safer than solo kayaking. Guess it’s time to switch over to perch fishing.

I would honestly have to pull it apart again and look, it’s been enough months that I don’t remember. I definitely had about four instances of the handle engaging during the cast and that was enough for me to quit fooling with it. I actually have the handle on a CV-253 now, I almost never use the combo it’s on but in the little bit I have used it I’ve never noticed the same problem.

Yea, maybe I will rekindle my love of perch fishing in April. With C&R closed for stripers the tidal rivers should be pretty empty.

How crowded was it the last time you were there? I’m fairly close to dragging my kayak out for its inaugural run this year but with Rocky Gorge, Triadelphia, and Centennial closed I fear everywhere else is going to be packed.

Yep, Last year I bought one of the new Ryoga 1520 reels and immediately stuck a big single knob handle on it. Three trips and two lost swimbaits later it came right off. It’s too bad though, I loved the feel of it and it made slow rolling a Hudd a breeze

One of the old threads about back-reeling inspired me to try it and oh man it did not work out well. It was like trying to drive down a very curvy road in reverse, I see how you could practice well enough to where it was second nature, I can’t see the advantages being enough to submit myself to learning process.

Could the spool shaft have gotten bent?

I use more Cover Craws then Fat Ikas but I use the same hooks for both, either 4/0 Owner Beasts or 4/0 Gamakatsu Deep Throat Wide Gaps. I use them almost exclusively pitched to cover or in pad fields so I MH-H rods and 14-16lb line.

That’s one of the reasons that I always label the length in huge letters on multiple places on the tube, I want to make it as easy as possible for someone to notice and pull it off of the line.

I have one of the 611M+ rods and it's seriously outstanding. It took me a few months to admit it to myself, but it's replaced my beloved 783c GLX as my "all around bank fishing rod". It fishes well over most all of it's range and the taper is very close to the Loomis MBR rods.

Looking at the regulations for 2020, it would seem we are running out of stripers, all of April is now closed for everything, even catch and release.

That’s an incredibly bad place to store your dead possums.