Savage Gear SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g lure rod review - around £90 (I am ignoring the ratings, feels like a 10-40g rod for my shore fishing)

As per this blog post here from August, I have Ben Field of the excellent Art of Fishing tackle shop to thank for alerting me to the fact that these “budget” SGS2 lure rods from Savage Gear were worth a look. If the world was perfect - no comment, especially right now! - then tackle companies would have the time and resources and personnel to recognise when certain items of fishing gear they make might be worth putting to people like me to have a look at. Things sometimes don’t work like this though for any number of reasons, and to be perfectly honest these SGS2 rods kinda passed me by until Ben said have a waggle back in the summer…………..

And because I am working with Savage Gear I was able to ask if I could please see a few different rods from the extensive SGS2 range. As much as it was the 8’3’’ 10-35g that Ben showed me which felt so interesting, it’s actually this more powerful 8’3’’ 20-60g which jumped out at me straight away from the bundle of bright blue SGS2 rods bags I have here at the moment. If you read my rod reviews on here or have fished with any of the more expensive Savage Gear SGS5 or SGS8 rods then you have most likely worked out what kind of lure rods tend to do it for me when it comes to UK and Ireland bass fishing. As much as the SGS2 8’3’’ 10-35g is really interesting and will be getting some proper water time, it’s this SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g which I have been fishing with recently.

I would argue that some fishing rods need a decent amount of fishing time to fully open up with what they can and can’t do (SGS8 9’2’’ 9-42g, Shimano Genos 9’ 8-48g, SGS6 8’3’’ 12-42g for example) - and some don’t. I haven’t fished a huge amount with this SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g but I have fished with all the lures I might need to on this rod, and I know as much as the rod’s going to tell me for my shore based bass fishing (I have also done a few dog walks combined with casting different lures on this rod). I knew the moment I removed it from its bright blue and fairly cheap-feeling rod bag (I don’t use them anyway) that firstly it wasn’t a 20-60g lure rod for for my shore fishing, and secondly that it felt really rather impressive on the waggle test which we knows means very little but we keep convincing ourselves that it does! When I say that I don’t think it’s a 20-60g rod for lure fishing, it can obviously cope just fine with these sorts of weights when fishing more vertically from the boat. Interestingly a mate picked this rod up and the first thing he said was along the lines of it feels like a really nice rod for the boat. The photo above is of a halibut that one of the Savage Gear lads caught on this exact rod when fishing the 86g Savage Gear Sandeel from a boat!

For casting and working and retrieving lures from the shore though, I stand by my assertion that this SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g rod works much better when fished with lures in the 10-40g range. I have chucked a 60g casting jig on this rod when fishing on the rocks and it got out there okay, but the rod feels like it wants to keep on bending and I don’t like the feeling. The 40g 3D Jig Minnow goes out really well on this rod though, and whilst the rod isn’t remotely stressing when whacking this lure as hard as I can, to me it feels like the upper limit of effective, hard-casting performance so I am not going to fish with lures over 40g on it from the shore. It’s the 20g rating of the quoted 20-60g figures which I find a bit disappointing then, because this SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g really likes both sizes of my Gravity Sticks, indeed the easier action of the rod suits casting and fishing these soft plastics rather well.

When we designed the roughly £150 SGS5 9’ 9-35g lure rod, I was after a “sharp” feeling rod which was still easy to cast and would forgive the odd badly timed chuck. Whoever was responsible for this SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g has gone down a slightly different route with how the rod works. This is not what I would describe as a particularly “sharp” lure rod, but because it’s relatively powerful and short this rod feels a bit more than the sum of its parts if that makes sense. I have cast a few times with the longer SGS2 9’6’’ 15-50g rod and to be honest it’s not really for me with how the butt bends in the cast (such a nice tip though, give me a more powerful mid and butt section and things would get very interesting), but this shorter 8’3’’ rod works because it is exactly that - shorter. Not so much length to keep on bending when you’re casting, and with this particular rod it helps suit me better.

I like the guides on this rod but I guess they will need regular washing down with freshwater. I would also be interested to see this rod with one or two less guides actually on the rod because there seem to be a lot on there to me. I really like the slightly chunkier duplon foregrip but I would like something a bit more grippy behind the reelseat. It works okay for me because of the way I hold a rod with spinning reel - stem between little finger and right ring finger on my right hand - but I recognise that a lot of anglers hold a reel slightly differently and a lack of something grippy might bother them. I can’t really complain at the price but if I had had any input into this rod I’d have gone for some duplon behind the reelseat.

Okay, so we’re talking about a £90 lure rod here, but why shouldn’t £90 of anybody’s hard earned money potentially buy you a pretty damn good lure fishing rod these days? I don’t know whether an 8’3’’ 20-60g long lure rod which I am treating as 10-40g is something which would suit your own fishing, but as a rod for me and my shore fishing I really rather like this thing. I have only fished with the Penn Slammer IV 2500 spinning reel on this rod so please don’t ask me about balance and such stuff because I never really know what that means in real fishing terms anyway, but as a rod to go about at least a good chunk of my shore based bass fishing, this SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g lure rod is bloody impressive. I can bang the Patchinko on, I can put the very long-casting 20g SG Slap Walker surface lure a frigging mile out, regular hard lures like the Hound Glide do great, I can fish my Gravity Sticks just fine, as I said earlier the 40g 3D Jig Minnow goes out well, and I can bump the jig head rigged soft plastics around just fine. What more does one expect for £90?

An interesting comparison to this rod is the considerably more expensive Savage Gear SGS6 8’3’’ 12-42g lure rod which continues to freak me out how good it is. From the affiliate link though this comparable SGS6 rod is about 2.4 times more expensive than the SGS2 rod we are talking about today. Whilst it is so easy to feel how much more tension and steel and “sharp” feeling there is in the somewhat more refined SGS6 lure rod, you are going to catch just as many fish in as many different locations on the far cheaper SGS2 rod. I get to see a lot of anglers and how they cast, and I can’t ignore how the easier to bend SGS2 rod will get a lot of lures out a bit more easily for some people, but if we take money out of the equation here then for me it’s going to be the more precise feeling SGS6 8’3’’ 12-42g rod for me all day long. Give me no more than £90 to spend on a general purpose, do a hell of a lot of my bass fishing lure rod though, and I would be more than happy with this Savage Gear SGS2 8’3’’ 20-60g. It’s fantastic - at 10-40g.

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