Savage Gear SGS5 9’6’’ 9-35g lure rod review - around £160 (should I be reviewing a fishing rod I helped develop?)

Can you fully appreciate something or indeed someone until you have been parted for a while and then come back to it or them? For me this is very much the case with this sublime Savage Gear SGS5 9’6’’ 9-35g lure rod which for the purpose of this review let’s call the SGS5 9’6’’ (there is also a more powerful SGS6 9’6’’ 12-46g). If you didn’t already know, I have been completely involved with all the new Savage Gear SGS5 and SGS8 lure rods from day one, and that I have essentially been able to help make THE lure rods I want to fish with when I chase bass from the shore……………

So how on earth can I review a lure rod which I have been so involved in and which I happen to think is pretty much perfect anyway? Well I’ll leave that up to you and whether you want to read any more of this blog post. For sure there’s an evolution of scale when it comes to price, and the Savage Gear people and me started off by working our socks off to create the four best SGS8 rods we could - and then we went hard at making the cheaper, roughly £150 SGS5 range as close as we could get to the SGS8 rods whilst having to obviously allow for a slightly cheaper grade of carbon and “lesser” fixtures and fittings when compared to the Fuji Torzite guides and Fuji reel seats on the £300+ SGS8 range. If this doesn’t really end up being a review and instead becomes me telling you what I believe this SGS5 9’6’’ can do then I apologise - I wasn’t going to “review” my rods as such anyway - but it’s the whole coming back to this rod and almost realising all over again just how good it is that got me thinking about this blog post today.

A hell of a lot of testing/real fishing time went into all our current SGS5 and SGS8 lure rods. I know them inside out and I have pushed them all beyond their casting weights etc. The fishing tackle trade doesn’t sit still though, and when these rods hit the market earlier this year I was already moving onto new rod ideas and samples and so on. I might or might not have been fishing with a whole bunch of different lure rods for a fair while now which might or might not end up on the market, and although it’s the SGS8 9’2’’ 9-42g rod which I choose to fish with the most if I am not working on new rods, I am beyond proud of how good and distinctly high-end feeling our cheaper SGS5 range of rods are (yes, I really will take the SGS8 9’2’’ 9-42g rod over my beloved Shimano Exsence Genos “Wild Contact 90” S90MH/R 9' 8-48g because this particular SGS8 rod is deliberately different and easier to fish with).

And I happen to think that this SGS5 9’6’’ 9-35g is something very special indeed. Coming back to fishing with it after some time away from it playing with other rods has banged home to me just how good a rod this is. It’s not quite as light (155g) as the more expensive SGS8 9’6’’ 9-35g version (135g), but I can fish any number of different lures and techniques with this cheaper SGS5 9’6’’ and if I close my eyes and don’t see the blue colouring on the rod then I am still genuinely amazed at how awesome this thing is. If you like a 9’6’’ rod which can do what most lure anglers need a bass rod to do, and you don’t want to spend much more than £150, then bearing in mind how many different lure rods I have fished with now plus the fact that I am working with Savage Gear (but I hope you might trust me) - this for me is by a distance THE best 9’6’’ all round bass lure rod for up to about £250 that I have fished with so far. In all honesty I am slightly dreading the time when we have to think about upgrading this SGS5 9’6’’ because as far as action and feel goes, for the time being I can’t really see how we can improve upon it and remain at the same sort of price.

You know how I like a sharp and steely and responsive lure fishing rod. This SGS5 9’6’’ is that in spades. I literally just enjoy casting lures on this thing. The tip and how it works for me is basically perfection when it comes to what I like fishing with. I’ll take a rod rung with Fuji guides as much as the next angler, but over a lot of time now using rods rung with the SeaGuide CCS guides which we are using on the SGS5 range? From day one of using these guides I have had a hunch which I can’t prove - I am pretty much convinced that the design of these CCS guides is putting a little bit of extra distance on my lures with how efficiently the braid travels through the first guide especially. As I said, it’s a hunch and nothing more, but damn I like these SeaGuide CCS guides and using them helps us to hit the price point AND not have to take away from the actual blank. The reel seats on these SGS5 rods is not a genuine Fuji because I pushed hard to use the best carbon possible to hit the price point. Savage Gear call it a “Savage Gear Competition reel seat”, and from day one of sampling these rods we have been using these reel seats and I have yet to have a single problem.

If you lure fish for bass then you know what a rod rated 9-35g is meant to be doing for you, and the length of lure rod you like to fish with is always going to be a very personal thing. I honestly can’t get enough of how well this SGS5 9’6’’ casts and fishes the Gravity Stick soft plastics so precisely, and yes, the Patchinko and Hound Glide and so on go a country mile. I was so insistent that the tip on this rod didn’t “collapse” when working surface lures at range, and I really like how well this rod bends into lures like the Savage Minnow, Savage Gear Sandeel V2 and Fiiish Black Minnow when you’re working them along the bottom. I worked through huge range of different lures and weights of lures when I was going through the testing phase with the different samples of all our rods, but as I said earlier about coming back to gear and also thanks to some good anglers I correspond with and keep a bit of an eye on - this SGS5 9’6’’ 9-35g makes the most awesome surf fishing rod if you don’t need to fish lures over 35g. It puts the 35g or 30g Surf Seeker out a country mile, and what I really like is how the tip doesn’t flap about in strong winds and bug the hell out of me. It stays sharp. That strong feeling of precision I get with this rod was very deliberate in the more expensive SGS8 9’6’’ 9-35g rod which then leached down to this SGS5 version, but in some respects I think that this cheaper SGS5 rod works a touch better in the surf.

As for the sort of spinning reel to match with this rod, well I’ve tried the lot. You can quite happily fish a 3000 size Shimano but I happen to prefer how a 4000 or C5000 size Shimano sits on this SGS5 9’6’’. I really, really like how good the Penn Slammer III 3500 or indeed the brand new and slightly smoother Slammer IV 3500 feels on this rod. Give it five minutes of real fishing time instead of waggling it around at home and once again the extra bit of weight on the reel feels so good on the end of a 9’6’’ lure rod. One reel I am starting to really like on this rod is the brand new Savage Gear SGS8 4000, but it’s far too early for me to tell if this reel is going to last as well as I reckon a £140 spinning reel should (how long is that actually meant to be?!). From a weight and feel point of view it’s a really good match up to me, but the one reel which above all else I can’t get enough of on this rod is the soon to be on the market Penn Slammer IV 2500. This SGS5 rod and that reel go together like Norway and black metal to me, which if you know anything about the finest music on satan’s earth is basically perfection. And that’s the way I genuinely feel about this rod - perfection. Perhaps I was always going to say that when I got to help make THE roughly £150 9’6’’ lure rod I want to fish with, but even then I have found another whole level of love for this rod by not fishing with it for a while and coming back to it in spades. Fishing rods are always very personal things, and this Savage Gear SGS5 9’6’’ 9-35g lure rod is as good as it gets in my humble opinion.

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