bogfrog

It looked way nicer with the black and silver T-3 reel on it, a perfect color match to the RodGeeks silver blank. While it wasnt the ideal frog rod I had hoped it would be, pairing with the slower reel actually makes it more versatile and it gets used a lot more than my frog rod. Ive always seemed to have better luck when I get a rod and then decide what its best suited for, rather than trying to stick to a plan. Im fortunate enough to be within 20 minutes of great fishing for Largemouth, Smallmouth, Walleye, Pike, Musky, Salmon, Steelhead, and Big Browns. This rod has applications for all those species, and as you can see in the pic it gets used quite a bit.

BEST is a loaded term. Best quality for the money? Best fish catchers with price no object? Most durable? Best overall quality? If I had top pick one I would probably go with Jackall. The fish dont see these as often as more common brands, they are really well built, The fish really seem to like some of their models, Tuning is perfect out of the box, They have great color options, they come up with some unique innovations the competition doesnt steal for a year or so, and you dont need a second mortgage to buy (most of) them. Some of their stuff is off the wall crazy, but a lot of it is the type of baits we fish every day. The Jackall I probably use the most is the Aragon, in any of the natural or ghost colors. I used to be a LuckyCraft man, but the Japan versions are getting harder to come by, and the LuckyCraft USA versions are an insult compared to the JDM versions. Like so many companies, they lowered their standards and went for the high profit margins.

Narrowing it down to 6 must have lures would give my wife's divorce lawyer way too much ammunition. I do have one suggestion. I began throwing a Duel Hardcore Noi-Z 105F last year, a 4" jointed wake bait with a rear prop. This bait hammered both largemouth and smallmouth along weed edges and working through pencil reeds. There were a couple days I would have been skunked were it not for this lure, and on those days my buddy, a VERY good fisherman, did get skunked. I had my best luck on Blue Back Chartreuse color. For the price its worth having one of these for those days the fish have lockjaw. Warning! Pike LOVE these baits, so if you're fishing toothy waters I would suggest a leader.

If they wont exchange this reel for you, contact your nearest Shimano Rep, show him this picture, and ask him how he would like to see it as the first result in a google image search for "Shimano Reel".

In 1997 I bought my first Daiwa CV-z reel. It was around $350.00 Ive used it every season since. Thats $20.58 per year to fish with one of the finest reels made. My buddy refuses to pay more than $50 for a reel and gets about a season out of them. Over the past 17 years he has spent $850.00 and is still fishing with a fifty dollar reel. A major bonus for me is that over the years other CV-Z owners have abandoned these reels for something newer and shinier and I can snip them on the online auctions for $100 to $150 bucks.

This is a defective reel. Try making a high quality well tuned reel spool like this....you wont be able to do it! I use a lot of reel brands, and am a ***** for none of them. The first sign of trouble and it becomes someone else's problem. I have Daiwa, Garcia, Tica, Okuma, one Piscifun, Pflueger, etc....not one Shimano! Ive owned plenty of them and got tired of the same crap you are dealing with now. You can get a clinker in any brand, but for the price its all too common on Shimano reels any more. My buddy bought a K last spring and it didnt perform as well as a Daiwa CC80 I paid $40 bucks shipped for. My honest objective opinion, Daiwa reels come with the fewest surprises. Of course you get what you pay for, but for what you paid for that Curado you could have bought a Tatula. These are sweet reels and seldom featured in "what's wrong" posts. I can see the Shimano guys going for their keyboards already....LOL While this could be a possibility, all Daiwa reels are designed to function with a few thousandths of end play in the spool and Ive never seen one do this unless it was worn out or had some other issues. I still say this reel has some issues in the timing or machining in the level wind. If it were mine it would already have been returned. When we pay this kind of money for a reel it shouldnt be up to us to diagnose problems. Take it back and ask them if the properly functioning reels are the same price, then demand one that works!

To be blunt, Berkley mono is junk. Im sure this will get a lot of the guys running for the torches and pitchforks when they hear this, but in my experience its the absolute truth. Big Game is one of the worst, surpassed only by their Abrasion Resistant line. These days I rarely use more than a couple feet of mono at a time, but when I was still using mono the 3 brands I found to be the best were, in order, Stren, YoZuri, and (believe it or not) Shakespeare Cajun Red. Question....If Berkley is giving you problems, why do you still use it? Mono is cheap. Ignore the advertisements and endorsements and do your own research, you might be surprised....like I was when I saw how many big muskies caught on bass gear were landed by Cajun line, one of the cheapest lines available.

The Garcia Silver max has a switch, if you dont mind fishing with junk. The Daiwa TDZ-HL reels are some of the finest ever made and while they can be cast easily, these reels are designed to be a flipping specialist from the ground up. They have been out of production for awhile, but are common on "online auction site". They sold new for about $400 and up, but they can be had for as little as $100 at times. If you want a serious high end dedicated flipping machine do yourself a favor and check one out. You wont be disappointed.

I was guiding in northern Wisconsin and getting a lot of smallies on the Luckycraft LV-100 in ghost minnow. I picked up a client one day who had ten 3700 Plano boxes filled with every hard bait you can imagine. We began to fish and I was getting bit on every cast with the LV-100. My client was getting zero hits, and went through every bait he had (including a bunch of lipless) without a fish (while I was killing them). Finally he broke down and tried the LV and began getting fish. Any bait can catch fish, but there is something to it when a bait gets hit every cast while NOTHING else is catching any fish. I havent been without one of these baits in the boat for over 10 years. The Tactical Bassin guys swear by the bigger LV-500 for CA largemouth. Give one of the LV's a try, and stick with it. If there is one bass in your lake it will get him eventually.

Youre passing up some of the biggest fish by letting the weeds run you off. Get yourself a 7'6" or 8' musky class rod rated for 8 oz or so with a stout reel and 65 or 80 braid. Use the rod to get the fish off bottom, not the reel. Once you get a fish moving through the weeds, keep him moving! If you let them stop they are gone. The reel I have found that will bring a big fish out along with a bale of hay wrapped around him without stopping is the Okuma Komodo 350. I cant tell you why, but the Komodo seems to have more cranking power than the 300 Curado, Revo Toro 50 or the Lexa 300, and they are built like a tank. My fishing buddies say I pace back and forth all spring until the weeds are thick enough to walk on top of them. They may be right!

They could all use some help, the longer heavy power rods especially. I havent handled the newest extreme rods, but the older versions had a rear grip that was a lot shorter than competitors like Daiwa. An inch longer rear grip can make all the difference. Ask around....I'm by no means the only one saying this. When you make one of the lightest rods on the market the place where you have take the weight off is the butt, leaving the tip heavier. You can either add weight to the butt (increasing rod weight) or slide the reel seat farther ahead to get proper balance.

Its a great flip/pitch rod, heavy jigs in river current, spinnerbaits, traps and it probably gets as much use as a Pike/Musky downsize rod as it does for bass. Originally this rod had a Daiwa T-3 1016 XH reel for frogging but the tip was just too light to drag big fish out of heavy cover on an 8:1 reel. With the 5.1:1 CVZ it even makes a nice glider and deep crankbait rod that will cast a mile.

I dont know why St.Croix insists on building tip heavy rods. It would be an easy problem to fix.

Custom RodGeeks 7'11" XH, snake skin inlays, custom Castaway reel seat, American Tackle XMG super duty micro guides, Daiwa CV-Z 203A with Bassart carbon handle.

Braid can be used for virtually every application as long as its matched with the proper rod.

Back when Power Pro cam out with the red line that was supposed to become invisible in two feet of water I conducted my own test. One rod spooled with Hi=Vis yellow, and one spooled with the red line. Both rods were tied directly to identical 1/2 oz jigs with identical trailers. My girlfriend and I fished for an hour and then we swapped rods and fished for another hour. She caught 4 smallies on each color, and I caught 5 each. This was enough proof for me that line color makes no difference at all. There are plenty of guys that will argue this but I have never seen it make a difference. Do your own test and I'll bet you get similar results. One other thing....that red line bled all over a brand new rod and turned the cork PINK for the rest of the season!

These days the ratings on most rods is directly related to what sells the best and have no connection to reality. Try dropping a 1/4 oz jig on the bottom and see if the tip bends at all before the jig comes off bottom. I'll bet you'll need a half ounce to get the tip to load, maybe more on a high modulus rod like the helium. Back in the day nearly all MH rods were rated 3/8 to 1 oz, and 3/8 of an ounce wasnt enough to load the tip. Ive been building custom rods for about 40 years and have seen some of the most reputable companies use the exact same blank to build rods they rated at 14 lb and others rated at 20 lbs. This isnt my best guess, this is what the manufacturers told me. Your best bet is to ignore the numbers and experiment with different weights to find the sweet spot that works best for you. Remember, the performance that works best for you may not be what I would consider ideal, or anyone else for that matter.

On some reels the holes arent polished and have exposed machine surfaces on the inside where line normally wont make contact. Tying to these unpolished holes can cut your line like a razor blade. Tie to the hole, and then give the line a good strong pull to see if it will cut or not. The advantage of taping versus backing is that you still have plenty of line to flip it when it begins to wear and youll be fishing with new line again.

This isnt a frog rod. If you plan to fish cover it wont rip spinnerbaits out of the weeds either. Would make a great senko rod, or a good jig rod within its limitations. These have a fast tip and fish about a half power lighter than rated, in my opinion. One of the best Loomis rods when used within its limitations.

I have a custom St.Croix Legend Tournament pistol grip in nice shape, I believe its a Medium, X-Fast.

Yeah, the half ounce run a lot deeper. The 3-1/2" spot at 3/4 oz is in a class by itself. Most other brands we have tried weigh in around an ounce or more at 3-1/2". I'm actually trying to find these for a buddy. I have a few of the old Bingham 4", 1 oz blanks (discontinued long ago) I painted that work as well as the spots, but Im too selfish to share!

The wide spool is a CV-Z 300A, the narrow spool is my favorite CV-Z 203A. The 203 wityh cork knobs is a JDM model with 5.8:1 retrieve. I have a dozen of these, including mid size CV-Z 253A that I was too lazy to take off a rod...LOL. Aside from custom handles these reels are unaltered. Take the handle side cover off a calcutta and all you see is plastic....these are all metal.

You seem like a guy who likes to experiment, so you may want to fool around with this some. I began experimenting with small "rare earth" magnets a couple years ago on baits with the kidney shape rattle chambers like the vision baits. The objective was to lock the rattles in one position once the bait hit the water. By doing this I was hoping to control the lure to a nose up or nose down position. You're never really sure where the weights are in these. I found that some rattles are highly magnetic while others have practically no magnetism. Most of the water I fish gets pretty weedy and most of my season consists of spinnerbaits, frogs and jigs once the weeds come to the surface, and as a result I abandoned this project. I did find that certain jerkbaits did perform better and I think I caught more fish than I may have otherwise, but how do you know for sure? Depending on the location of the magnets you might have to use heat shrink on your hooks to keep them from attaching to the magnets. If you're in an area where you can fish clean water thru the summer you might hit on something that will work for you if you play around with the magnets long enough.

Ive tried them and caught fish on them all the way up to the 1.5 oz super trap. The cordell runs shallower than any lipless I've tried, and the fish EAT them! We mainly fish these over submerged weed beds in shallow water and the cordells stay above the weeds better than any we've tried, and we've tried most of them.

If its truly the LAST reel it would have to be a Daiwa CV-Z. I believe I bought my first one in 1997 and have used it every season since. A lot of other reels have come and gone since. For one reel to last the rest of your life durability has to be the main consideration.