fishwizzard

How durable are they? I use 3” Easy Shiners as a dropshot plastic and they will sometimes rip off just from a light snag in cover, nevermind when a bass grabs them. Using a CPS spring helps a lot but it makes them sink nose-down too fast.

Daiwa BG all day every day. Their weight is the only bad thing I could say about them and even that is a plus on some rods.

The shortage seems to be a universal thing, the more popular models are going for a premium on ebay it looks like. It's strange though, it's not like Shimano is a little mom&pop company that had a product blow up and became unable to meet demand. But, it seems like Japanese companies are really conservative when it comes to production numbers for new products. The most "famous" case recently was Nintendo. They released an updated version of one of their classic consoles a few years ago and completely underproducted for the demand, they were selling on ebay for like 300-400% of MSRP and it took Nintendo months and months to get more on the market.

My “core three” kayak rods are; - 6’ MH/F casting - 6’ MH/F casting - 6’ ML/F spinning There is a fourth spot that gets either a M/XF topwater rod, a M/F light plastics rod, or a MagL/XF drop shot rod. I think this year I am adding a fifth holder so I can bring a wildcard rod.

I am thinking that the grit came from my cheap brushes, next time I will buy a fancy $1 foam brush.

I got to play with a Van Staal at a fishing show once. If they made a reel like their SW ones but the size of a 1000 Stradic I would save up and buy it. They are such beautiful machines, the minimalistic raw aluminum look is so cool.

I have the cheapest one Amazon had for sale and it isnt great. For bearings I put them in a little glass jar of acetone and then put that in the cleaner. Honestly most of my reels only get a deep cleaning right before I sell them. The few times I crack one open to fuss with it there is never much if any filth inside, so I stopped doing it and just focus on the exposed parts like the levelwind worm. The next time I have an extended work trip I want to send all my reels out for a full clean and tune, it will be interesting to see if performance improves much.

Huh, this is the first one that felt that way for me and it's not an even grit, but some patches I can feel but not see. Very fine like 500g sandpaper is about what it feels like. An hour's use today more or less made it go away in any case.

Since this old thread got bumped up I’ll ask it here, has anyone ever experience U40 getting gritty? I just sealed a rod last night and when I went to get it ready to take out this morning I noticed a very slight feeling of grit on some parts of the cork. My little bottle of U40 is maybe 80% empty and is probably three or four years old at this point. I admit that the foam brush I used was a $0.05 flea-market special so maybe it’s to blame, but I have been using bushes from the same lot for all my other rods with no issue.

Good to hear. I have a lot of luck with the Mattlures small gills but loosing one of them to a snapping turtle is painful.

I bought of their 5" 3D Bluegills last fall and that thing has the most amazingly bad hookup ratio. The stock trebles are very small in relation to the lure and any bass that does not really eat the lure is going to shake it off like 90% of the time. It got hit a lot though and I want to keep using it, I think this spring I am going to remove the bottom treble and try a far larger one on top, if that does't work I will try a BB rig or something like that. The lure has such a good "alarmed panfish running all-out" action but I don't know why they stuck such small hooks on it. I see that they now have a 4" model with a top jig-hook, does anyone know if it has the same action as the 5" one? If so I think it could be a real winner.

I try to carry only 2 colors of any given plastic and the "Junebug or Black" debate keeps me up at night. The "Green-pumpkin or Watermelon" one is easy as you can get a laminate of them in most plastics, but I cannot settle the Junebug/Black question.

It seems to be a jumble of their rods: https://www.ebay.com/itm/KUYING-TETON-Super-Ultra-Light-Baitcasting-Spinning-Rods-Various-Sizes-Weigh/132949565094?hash=item1ef4695ea6:m:mxot6XhIlYSjnd3VIru5ZKQ:rk:1:pf:0 It also seems like they are mostly $125 now :/

A 3/16oz jig is going to be +/- 3/8oz once you add up the weedguard, skirt, hook, and trailer. I fish my little jigs around that weight on a XXX Black Themis (1/8-1/2oz) with 7lb fluoro and it has been working out great, but I am very limited in terms of what kind of cover I can fish it in. It's hoot to fish though and the tiny jigs really got me used to detecting bites and setting hooks in a hurry.

I think most peoples' concept/experence of fishing is dropping a hook and bobber straight down or casting it like 5' off the end of the dock, so it does not occur to them that a someone in a boat fishing "takes up" more space then just the footprint of the boat. None of the places I regularity yak fish for bass allow gas motors so bass boats are just huge kayaks to me. On tidal rivers with a lot of boat traffic I just assume that every power boat launched that day to specifically run me over and plan my fishing according.

Yea, this makes a huge difference.

I am not a good person to ask as I believe I run my casting reel drags far looser then most as my palming grip puts my thumb on the spool so I can add "drag" as needed. On spools with braid I keep the drag loose enough to let me pull line by pinching it between my thumb and pointer finger, so far this has been tight enough that I have never had hook-set issues but again I ride the spool with my thumb and my hand naturally tenses up when I detect a bite and go to set the hook.

Anyone want some cardboard rod tubes? I need to clear out most of my hoard and I cannot bear cutting them up for the recycling bin.

Eh, you are paying for the tube and shipping even if it isn't line-itemed out, I would assume most places just factor it into the selling price of the rod.

The line breaks right at the lure every time it has happened to me. You can mitigate it by keeping the drag a little loose and giving the line a little tug after every fish, snag, or after a dozen or so casts. You will get a feel for it pretty quickly. I think 20lb will be fine for 3/4oz so long as you check the spool. For lighter lures the dig-in will not snap the line, but will backlash the spool. I am going to try 20lb braid on my topwater rod this year and I throw up to like 5/8oz walkers and think it will be ok. Also, even if you want to switch later to 40lb or 30lb, there is no need to trash the 20lb. Braid has no memory and you can just wind it onto an empty line spool or even a pencil and reuse it once you find a need.

On my yak I just throw wet lures into an 3600 w/o dividers with an old washcloth in the bottom of it, the lures are usually dry by the time I land and get my yak loaded. On foot I keep a rock climbing chalk-bag clipped to my belt and throw wet lures in there, again they are usually dry by the time I make it back to my car.

What @Allen Der is taking about is when during the cast the thinner braid is very vulnerable to shock-loading and snapping. What often happens is that the line will dig into it's self on the spool and even that little bit of resistance will shock the braid and snap your lure off. A week or so ago I decided to see if I could get away with using 40lb PP to throw 6" swimbaits. With the plastic + weighted hook weighing in a bit over 2oz, I ended up breaking off three lures in maybe 2 hours of fishing. The same 40lb PP works wonderfully for 1oz total weight jigs. The same break-offs also happen on my UL casting combo with 6lb braid and 4g spoons, there is some ratio of lure weight:line strength where the lack of stretch in the braid becomes too much of a liability.

That's a tough set of requirements you have there. Have you looked at the old-model 6'6" MBR GLX rods? The 783c or 784c rods sound like what you are looking for. The new model 783c has too long of a butt for kayak use but the old model rods have nice short butts and are still pretty easy to find on ebay. There are also the old Loomis Classic Bass rods, which are 6' and 6'6" rods with the same taper as the MBR ones. My kayak arsenal is mostly older IMX and GLX rods from the CR and MBR lines. I really like them, they are the perfect legnth for yak fishing and the tapers are really nice for controlling and landing bass.

I just went through this process and ended up with a MB Addermine. It arrives tomorrows and I am super pumped to play with it. I picked it over one of the NRXs because I wanted a more general purpose rod and I was worried about the ergonomics of the NRXs and never managed to get my hands on one. I am a "all fingers infront of the stem" kind of guy so spinning rod reel-seats are a make or break for me.

Me too, I have a small pile of various MBR rods and just love them. I also really like the Loomis MagLight/XFast spinning rods, they are the best "tiny plastic on a jighead" rods I have found.