So I have two outfits here, inland, at the moment. One is a Penn Battle II 1000 on a little crappie rod "BooCoo" or something, and second is a Sahara 2500 on one of my inshore rods -- a Temple Fork Outfitters 7' M spinning rod. This reel was bought quickly at BPS (they're open locally!) to replace a Stradic HG-K that died from salt, and it's 'ok.' Sahara seems heavy. Impulsive buy, but I like Shimano, and this was in a blister pack so I could get in and out.
On another impulsive buy, I bought and spooled it with Yozuri TopKnot Mainline fluoro, which I've never used before, and I had to pull the spool off 20x yesterday to untangle, which is a b*tch in a kayak, while getting rocked by wakes.
I will probably pick up another spinning rod -- a 6'6" ML something -- to go with the Battle, and make that my main freshwater rod.
Some good tackle suggestions. When I was 30 years younger, I fished lakes mostly to catch and *eat* (crappie and cats) so worked a lot of live bait, but the stuff we used for bass were rubber worms, mostly Texas-rigged, Rattletraps, and something called a Devils Horse for topwater. I had this giant Poes wooden crankbait, but never caught anything with it. Neither I nor my buds had much money back then, so buying and losing ONE lure like a Rattletrap was a big deal, so we mostly fished worms.
The lingo has changed a bit. Certainly don't remember 'senko' and the term "Ned rig" seems like exactly how I do 95% of my fishing inshore in the marshes for speckled trout, flounder and drum: just a softplastic (typically SW Gulp or Z-Man) on a 1/4-3/8oz jig head.
But it sounds like a couple decent crankbaits, fish the plastics properly, and I should be set.
