JD, I mainly fish for salmon, trout and steelhead. I’ve never really had any desire to fish bass fish and have thought of them as kind of a boring fish. As I get older, however, I’m really finding myself wanting to go after the bucketmouths more often. I only live about half an hour from Clearlake and want to get good at bass fishing. I’m not worrying about figuring it out, I just want some help with rod selection for different techniques. My question is this…which of my steelhead and salmon rods will work best for crankbaits, spinnerbaits, swimbaits, jig fishing, and fishing plastics with different rigs, etc? I know most of my rods are long, but oh well, I’ll make due. Thanks very much for your help!
–Kevin
Kevin,
Without going into every rod you own, let’s keep it simple. Yes, most of your steelie sticks are going to be too long for normal bassing, but if you’re trying to save a little $$ by not buying a bunch of new stuff, you can get by with some of your current gear.
For crankbaits, use any Kwikfish or Hotshotting rods you may have — ones with a soft tip and some good backbone. For flipping jigs, stout back-bouncing rods should do the trick. Heavy salmon back-bouncers will also probably suffice for topwater frogging and tossing big swimbaits.
For finesse tactics like drop-shotting, use a light spinning rod.
Hope that helps!
–JD
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