Is it realistic to expect a lure rod to perform perfectly at the top and bottom of the quoted casting weights, or are you after some kind of sweet spot?

Please accept my apologies in advance if this blog post ends up going a bit wayward, but I am not going through a particularly good sleeping pattern at the moment and I blame this on the current weather and sea conditions together with me thinking a lot more than usual about all things lure fishing tackle. I woke up at 3.45am this morning with my brain properly bouncing away about fishing related stuff yet again, and for various reasons which will become clear in time, I have been thinking a lot recently about lure rods and their casting weights……………….

I believe that lure rods around the 8’-9’6’’ length are probably the most popular lengths for UK and Irish based bass lure fishing from the shore, and then I would break that up a bit more by assuming that the let’s say 7-35g or 10-30g quoted casting weights sell better than the “next step up”, more powerful rods rated somewhere between say 10-50g. Think about all the different kinds of lure fishing for bass that you or I might do from the shore here in northern Europe and I reckon we can cover a great deal of it with lures weighing no more than 35g - bearing in mind of course that a 35g Surf Seeker is a very different lure to cast than a great big paddletail on a lightish jig head which might also weigh a total of 35g. I do find myself using lures over 35g sometimes, and this is why I will always have a lure rod in my armoury that can cope with the heavier stuff, but if I looked at the rods we are fishing with I would imagine that the largest percentage of them reside within that 8’-9’6’’, 7-35g range.

But let’s take a typical lure rod rated 7-35g, and then let’s look inside our lure boxes for a typical bass session and think about the weights of the lures you might turn to the most. I have a few smaller surface lures around the 10g mark, but most of them are about 14g+, and as much as soft plastics are a big, big part of my bass fishing, a Gravity Stick Pulsetail rigged on one of the 6/0 weedless hooks (no added belly or insert weights) weighs a fairly substantial 17g. This kind of weight for a soft plastic like this was very deliberate I might add, but already I am taking a 7-35g or even 10-30g lure rod and firstly I can’t recall using a 7g lure for bass, and secondly I am pretty rarely fishing with anything much under about 14g. This might change of course, but I can only talk about the here and now.

Then we explore the heavier lures I might carry for a typical session, and apart from lures like a 28g Seeker or the 30g Sandeel Pencil (plus the rather interesting new 30g Bomb surface lure from Samson Lures which casts so far it’s almost a joke), when I am out fishing with this 7-35g or 10-30g lure rod because of the location and conditions, I don’t tend to have a lure above the 30g weight with me anyway. Already we are looking at what to me is a normal lure rod around the 7-35g rating which isn’t really being asked to fish 7g or 35g lures. I like that Major Craft narrow down their ratings for their 10-30g rods, and whilst I know you can push the upper end with many of their rods that I have fished with, in reality when I am fishing with a lure rod like this I am not tending to push its limits on the casting front. How we might land our fish is another matter entirely I might add.

I am often out fishing in bouncy and windy conditions when I might want to turn to heavier paddletails for example, but even if I don’t end up fishing with much heavier lures than my 7-35g or 10-30g lure rod can cope with, I do tend to err towards the more powerful lure rods which sit somewhere in that roughly 10-50g “next step up” range. I like how a fast and more powerful lure rod has a slightly thicker tip on it that doesn’t flap around in the wind like an annoying sail, and a bit of extra grunt to the rod I believe helps me cope with what bouncier conditions throw at me. If you take a rod out in these conditions like the ridiculously good Shimano Dialuna S96M 9'6" 8-45g (a complete steal for the price in my opinion), am I realistically going to be fishing any lures which are much lighter than my 17g Pulsetail on its 6/0 weedless hook? The regular Patchinko which so many of us turn to on a regular basis is 25g+ for example, and I would never be without at least a couple of Hound Glides in my lure box when things get hectic out on the open coast, but these weigh only around 20g. If I push towards the top end of a rod like this Dialuna with the 42g Savage Gear Sandeel then we are still talking about a lure rod which for me ends up being more of a say 15-45g rod anyway. Shimano Japan can claim 8g on it all they like on this amazing Dialuna, and whilst you can of course cast an 8g lure on a rod rated to almost anything, would you want to be doing so to get the best out of the rod? Me thinks not.

Then you come to the few lure rods which I think are coming pretty bloody close to a kind of “do it all” category, but for the most part these rods are not cheap and even then I would argue that fishing 7-10g lures on something like the rather extraordinary HTO N70 Labrax Special N7094ML 9’4’’ 7-42g isn’t nearly as satisfactory as putting say 12-42g lures on it. Same with the Shimano Exsence Genos S90MH/R 9' 8-48g lure rod, and please have a read of a blog post I put up recently about how good a certain £100 rod is when compared to this thing - check here. This is no fault of the rods I might add, rather that I think that fishing rods which are designed to cast lures will all have a natural sort of sweet spot casting weight which is when the rod feels like it is performing the best.

And then as much as I love bass fishing with a lighter rod when locations and conditions allow for it, I’d rather depower something like that sublime Shimano Dialuna S96M 9'6" 8-45g to fish lighter lures if required, instead of trying to push a lighter rod with bigger lures in bouncy conditions when I’d feel undergunned. Please note as well that nowhere here have I made a single reference to the size of the fish we are targeting, because to me it’s far more about where and how we hook our glorious bass rather than their actual weight or lack of. Anyway, if you have got to here then thank you for reading the contents of my head on this wet and windy November morning! I have various reasons for thinking about all this at the moment, but for the time being I will leave it at that……………

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