Two 9’ lure rods with similar specs, but separated by more than £400 - how different are they, and can they be compared? Let’s give it a go……….

I don’t really know how to go about technically comparing lure rods against each other, but I do get asked a lot whether so and so rod at so and so price is as good as another similar rod, and like many of you here I am also genuinely interested to find out whether there are huge differences between two lure rods of fairly similar specs but vastly different prices. Does a whole lot more cash buy you a whole lot more lure rod, or are some of the cheaper rods so good these days that it’s difficult to ignore how the difference in price between these two rods I am going to talk about here would buy you a bloody good pair of breathable chest waders and wading boots which are two items of fishing tackle I consider to be just as important as a good rod and reel.

The two lure rods I am going to try and compare are my beloved and not cheap Shimano Exsence Genos S90MH/R 9' 8-48g (review here, let’s call it the Genos for this blog post) and the recently reviewed DAM Effzett Intenze Spin 9' 14-42g (review here, let’s call it the Intenze) which retails for £99.98 here in the UK, and which I think represents about as much lure rod for the money as I can recall coming across. The Genos if you can even find one would be north of £500 now in any money, and Shimano in their mighty wisdom don’t even bring this amazing rod into Europe so your buying options are limited at best. I can’t get away from it though - I have fished with my Genos for over a year now and it is without doubt the single best lure rod for me and the way I go about the bulk of my lure fishing for bass that I have ever had the pleasure of fishing with. The more I fish with the quite remarkable HTO N70 Labrax Special N7094ML 9’4’’ 7-42g though, the more this rod moves closer and closer to the Genos with how much it can do for me so amazingly well, and in fact I’d choose the N70 9’4’’ over this 9’ Genos in the surf. I digress though - is this remarkable Genos really a £400+ better fishing rod than the Intenze?

Comparing the prices alone obviously doesn’t make much sense if we are to be entirely logical here. My Epic Berlingo is a truly magnificent car but in terms of price it’s way cheaper than something like a top of the range Mercedes. Can you measure the differences between the two cars in monetary terms alone when the scale of diminishing returns surely comes into the mix? Nope, so let’s just try and compare the two rods as fishing rods whilst obviously knowing that one of them costs at least five times what the other one does. Is the Genos five times better than the Intenze then? Is my Epic Berlingo really say three or four times better than a top of the range Mercedes? Sorry, I got that the wrong way round, but you get my drift! Are the top of the range Simms waders really four or five times better than my awesome Vision Koski waders? (If you have worn Simms waders for the sort of saltwater fishing so many of us do here then you will know the answer to that one!). It’s impossible to measure whether one rod can be five times better than another one, and it makes no sense anyway. Let’s take them both out fishing a few times and keep chopping and changing rods to fish the same lures and see where we get to - which is exactly what I have done………………

In basic lure fishing terms there is nothing I can do on my Genos which I can’t do on this Intenze. The Genos may be rated from 8g at the lower end, but as good as it is, it’s a lure rod which comes to life around say the 12g mark to me, and the Intenze for me works pretty well at that 14g bottom end rating if you allow for the power in the rod and how to smoothly get the lighter lures out there. Both rods can go absolutely full power at a lure like the 40g Savage Gear Surf Seeker and in fact there is an argument in my mind that the Intenze is a smidgen more comfortable with a 40g lure than the Genos is. I have pushed the Genos to 45g lures at full power and it’s rated to 48g, but in reality I am not generally bass fishing with lures over 40g, and if I was regularly doing so I’d be turning to a more powerful rod anyway. The Genos can fish the heavier lures with no great stress but I don’t think I am playing to its strengths by doing so - there’s a sweet spot just as there is with any fishing rod, and it rarely tends to be at the extreme ends of the quoted casting weights. Let’s say then that both rods are completely comfortable in that 14-40g range which when you think about it covers a multitude of sins. Now have a look through the lure boxes you might take out fishing with you - are you carrying many lures for the bulk of your fishing that are outside of the 14-40g weights?

The fixtures and fittings on my Genos are obviously of better quality than the Intenze, but then so they should be for the price difference. The Genos is a lighter rod and you can easily feel this when you pick each rod up, but it’s not exactly a big thing once you get out fishing instead of trying to weigh setups and balance them on forefingers. I like to think I know all the ins and outs of my Genos and how it performs for me in specific situations and with specific lures, but I have also had enough time now with this particular Intenze to get a good feel for how it reacts to what I ask of it, and by fishing the two rods side by side on a few occasions the thing that has stood out to me the most isn’t how good the Genos is - I know this already - but how impressive this Intenze is as one of those sort of “do it all” lure rods I tend to obsess about. I am perfectly happy pressing more powerful lure rods into service for some of the lighter lure work because I like to think that I am comfortable adjusting how I need to cast the different lures to get the best out of different rods. This might be a load of crap by the way, but let’s give me the benefit of the doubt for the sake of this blog post eh? (If you don’t need to fish with lures of more than 28g then I would urge you to go for the DAM Effzett Intenze Spin 9' 7-28g instead of this 14-42g if you are after a lure rod around the £100 mark).

It’s the casting that for me is the first big difference between the rods. The Genos is a very powerful rod but it’s utterly effortless when casting any of the lures I might use on it. I am guessing it’s the mix of materials in this expensive rod that allows for such ease of casting the full range of say 14-40g lures, yet when you fish with the rod it feels so precise and “sharp”. There is an incredible amount of power but there is no straining required to get at it, indeed I would argue that with a rod like this Genos, it’s performing better with a lot of lures when you cast at say 75% and let the rod kick in and do the work. I still find myself oohing and aahing with this rod after more than a year, because a 35g Surf Seeker feels just as good in the cast as one of the Gravity Sticks or a DoLive does. Surface lures like the IMA Chappy and Patchinko 125 cast and fish perfectly on this Genos for me.

And they do on the considerably cheaper Intenze as well, but it’s how all the various lures I might use get out there which can feel somewhat different to the ease of the Genos. As I said earlier, this Intenze puts those say 20-40g lures out very well, but you need to work harder and wind the rod up. It’s when I drop down to soft plastics like these Gravity Sticks which obviously provide more air resistance in the cast that I notice how this Intenze needs a bit of finessing in the cast to help get the soft lures out there. The rod isn’t bad or anything like that, rather there is a lack of subtlety in the overall power of the blank that needs you to think about how you cast lures like these. The Genos almost does it for you as you turn the rod over, whereas there is equal amounts of power in this Intenze but it kinda struggles a bit with dialling down the grunt when needs be. I can live with this though because firstly I think I can play with my casting style to allow for it, and secondly because this Intenze is so nice to fish with that I am happy to make the odd allowance - which I wouldn’t I might add with a lure rod as expensive as the Genos.

I was on the phone to a mate the other day and he was asking me about various lure rods. I was trying my best to explain how I see the casting differences between two rods like this, and I said let’s take a lure like the Gravity Stick Pulsetail rigged weedless/weightless which I obviously know really well now. On the Genos you can cast it any which way you like and the rod is never trying to take over but there’s as much power there that you could ever need to push a soft plastic like this out there if needs be. Gently place the lure exactly where you want or blast it way beyond a load of bladderwrack, you never feel any strain in your arms when casting the Genos like this. Now pick up the Intenze and it’s pretty good when you are smoothly turning the rod over to place the Pulsetail somewhere, but now dial up the casting power and you can feel the rod fighting you a bit as you push into it before releasing the lure. It’s obviously unfair to even try and compare these two rods when the price difference is so large, but I am trying to get across why I think some of the more expensive rods cost what they do. This Intenze has got so much power in the blank but with the lighter lures which offer a bit more air resistance - soft plastics all over - you need to work the thing that bit harder to get at the power if you need it. I can feel it in my arms when I am blasting lighter lures on this thing.

The second big difference to me is what I am going to refer to as “tension”, and that’s mainly because I know what I can feel but I am not a technical kind of guy and I don’t quite know how to describe what I am feeling when I fish these two rods side by side - but tension is the word that keeps coming into my head when I fish with some of the more expensive and accomplished lure rods especially. I think of it with something like the awesome HTO N70 Labrax Special N7094ML 9’4’’ 7-42g lure rod, and I always think of it with this Genos - it’s that feeling when you feel completely connected to the lure and the ground you are fishing over. Every single twitch and bump and turn of the lure kinda sits within the whole rod as you fish with it if that makes any sense? It isn’t a case of feeling the tip on the end of a fishing rod, rather it’s the whole rod working as a complete and whole length of carbon. Note that for all the feel and feedback that I think these more expensive rods are giving me, when the wind is really blowing and the waves are rolling in, out of the window goes so much of that feedback whatever the price of your lure rod.

Fishing with this Intenze is a different experience to the Genos, as in what you see is what you get. The tip on the Intenze is pretty bloody stunning, but it’s the tip on this rod which to me makes it what it is. The power in the rod isn’t exactly that subtle, but the tip is doing so much work to make this rod feel pretty incredible when you are fishing with it. It’s not a soft tip I might add, but I am just not getting that feeling of contained tension through the whole rod when I am working lures on this Intenze. There is nothing remotely quantifiable here by the way, but I know what I am feeling. I don’t get this “tension” kind of feeling on many lure rods I might add, indeed it was the Shimano Exsence Infinity S900ML/RF 9’ 5-32g and how it doesn’t fish remotely how it feels when you waggle it that first got me thinking about the word tension. The rod obviously bends into a lure when you are working it, but you can feel this overall tension through the whole rod which simply doesn’t come across when you stand there and waggle it with that sort of intelligent look on your face like you are evaluating a fishing rod in no more than a couple of seconds. I get this tension thing with the Genos and also with the remarkable HTO N70 Labrax Special 9’4’’ 7-42g, but I don’t get it with this Intenze, and this isn’t remotely a complaint by the way because let’s think about the price difference again.

The simple fact is though that I can fish a session with the Intenze and after a few minutes of getting used to how it wants to work I forget all about the fact that I have a £100 lure rod in my hands. When I next go out fishing with the Genos I can feel how much better I think it is, but it’s not as if I am purring away and thinking yes, this thing is at least four or five times better than the Intenze because it obviously isn’t. Pricing doesn’t work like that. It’s a fishing rod at the end of the day, and in reality I’m going to catch or not catch just as many bass on either rod because as with lures you can obviously only catch on whatever gear you are using at the time. Without a doubt this Genos affords me a more pleasurable fishing experience, but these are two rods which essentially do the same things and get me there in slightly different ways. Because the Genos is so ridiculously good with such a wide range of lures I can literally do everything with it, and whilst I can of course do the same things with this Intenze I would choose to pick up the lighter 7-28g version if I was going fishing and wasn’t going to need lures above a 28g Seeker or something like that - which I might add is perfectly feasible because for just under £200 I could buy the two Intenze rods and still be seriously quids in by not going for this Genos. Hell, I could buy the 7-28g Intenze with a Penn Spinfisher VI 2500 and the 12-42g Intenze with a Penn Spinfisher VI 3500 and still have change left over by not going for the Genos. Those two setups would deal with any bass fishing with lures that I am aware of here in the UK or Ireland if you are happy with 9’ long rods - and perhaps that’s the thing here. You can spend what you are able to or want to and these days in fishing you can get a hell of a lot for your money. It simply doesn’t matter what fishing tackle you use if you like it and if it works well for you. Nothing will ever take away from the where and when being the two most important factors in saltwater fishing especially, but I hope I have gone some way towards explaining how I see the differences between two similar specced rods at such different prices.

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