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Rod butt / rod hand position

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Iowa Lad

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Hi All

 

Please excuse the very elementary question, but I'm not a striper angler.  I'm an Iowa exile, now living in the UK, and targeting the European sea bass. 

 

We use very similar tackle and lures, but scaled down to match a situation where a 10 lb fish on a lure is a very significant capture.

 

My question relates to where you position the rod butt and hands when wading in surf and fishing poppers etc that require input from the non-reel hand.  There are a multitude of good videos, but they tend to concentrate on the lure, the fish, or maybe the reel (esp Mr Skinner - very useful for us Brits), not the fishing stance and hand positions.  Clearly one hand is on the reel handle.  I imagine the other is significantly higher, well above the front grip?  and the butt is either wedged into your belly or tucked under your groin??

 

The lure rods commonly available in the UK have handle too short to accommodate supporting the butt between the legs, you end up with the reel in a vey low position near the crown jewels(!).  I want to build my own but before I do any pictures of an actual angler popping or WTD in surf showing the best rod butt and rod hand positions would be very welcome

 

Many thanks

 

Tim

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Greetings fellow Tim :)

 

It depends on the size of the outfit, length of the butt, the circumstances and even the lures you are throwing. Rods with short butts are usually fished one handed with the reel foot between either your pointer and middle finger - or middle finger and ring finger...whichever is more comfortable for you. In the course of a long trip I'll alternate between those two positions. You can also let the rod butt come up underneath your forearm for additional leverage or support if necessary.  If an outfit isn't comfortable to hold this way it's going to be less than ideal for fishing lures for fish less than 10# :) 

 

Longer butt rods, big waves, big lures...those are the times you'll see guys put the butt between their thighs...and that's when you'll see their rod hand up above the reel on the fore grip. Can't imagine you'd need that much stick to catch fish that rarely get to 10#...the conditions might dictate needing more rod to get over waves. Fish under 10# and smaller lures I'd be fishing along the lines of an 8 1/2' - 9 1/2' steelhead/salmon type rod - something light that fishes up to 1 1/2oz but a short butt that can easily be fished with one hand. 

 

Hope this helps :)

 

TimS

Show someone how to catch striped bass and they'll be ready to fish anywhere.
Show someone where to go striped bass fishing and you'll have a desperate report chaser with loose lips.

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From everything I’ve read about UK fishing is that the angler needs to cast FAR because the slope is very gradual. That’s why pendulum casting is so popular there.  If you are looking at setups where the reel is close to the butt it’s because many Britts cast with the left hand on the reel if they are right handed.  It looks weird but lots of folks over there do it that way.  I’d stick with what’s natural to you and either build one yourself or buy a rod with a movable reel seat or no reel seat and just use coasters

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Iowa lad

 

Boy do I feel,for you. I have been a European Bass Fisher for over 46 years fishing in the U.K. For ten past 23 or 25 years I have been dashing over the pond to fish first  of all  Montauk then Cape Cod and finally Maine to escape the degraded U.K. fishery.

 

Ok we fish different rods and with different styles to what I observe in the USA.

 

Our rods are very different to those typically seen on the NE Coast of the USA.

 

In the last ten years the rod scene has been dominated by rods originating from Japan. Length wise for shore fishing from  8 feet to ten feet. Very slim rods very fast actions , very light and often very expensive. The general purpose models  around 9 to 10 feet are designed to cast from 10 to 35 grams . To calibrate 28.5 grams = 1 ounce . These rods do not feel wimpy. They are crisp and have great sensitivity.

They incorporate new guide concept layouts and are in the main very well made and designed. 

As you have pointed out they do have very short handles. The reach is very short.. reason is to get max effective rod length. Now this means a ten foot version designed to  cast a bit more then 35 grams is hard work  if you are using the rod to,work surface lures . As Tim said the fingers  on the rod hand are wrapped around the reel stem and the none rod hand is busy working the reel.

 We tend not to fish our rods between our legs which is the norm in the US when working pencils and surface poppers and even buck tails. Can’t do this with short rods anyway.

The shorter rods say 7 feet to 8 feet can more easily be worked with these short reach butts. Some  European Anglers will use shorter than 7 feet.

These rods are capable,of casting long distances when required even the pretty short ones.

If I could find a way to by these Japanese domestic market  ( JDM) rod blanks I would build my own and change out a little the handle design.

 

But they are not designed to be used with the kind of reach  you would have say on a Lami GSB 120 1 L.

 

As they are designed to be held around the reel stem a long reach would mean the butt is fouling on your torso and is way less manoeuvrable . Did I mention we are fishing very different rods over here. 

In the U.K. we have a great club called the U.K. Bass Fishers Sports  Fishing Society.

We are a very friendly group. We have a quarterly magazine we  organise fish inns, have a private closed forum and Importantly  have a restoration team that does its best to deal with U.K. government and Europeans to ensure the continuation of a Bass fishery . You can google us up U.K. Bass. Best 25 quid you could spend fishing wise.

There are still Bass to be caught in the U.K. waters and it’s much better in S.Ireland just over the Irish Sea.  It is just much harder work than fishing  for Stripers and skunks are way more common.

A good resource  for lures  and rods and info is a tackle shop,called The Art of Fishing. Ben runs it and is one of the good guys out there.

There is a huge wealth of knowledge of course inside the Bass Society.

Lure fishing in the U.K. now has taken off big time. Mainly but not all new kids off the block. You can tell the new ones as they use terms like PB and they don’t measure their fish in pounds and ounces or inches but in centimetres.

 

The cost of lures is now breathtaking. Four hard  plastic plugs can set you back more than £100 . A few months ago that would have equated  to $150.

 

Good news is you don’t need many and SP are very very effective.

 

When you have 15 posts if you wish you can  send me a PM and I will help you as much as I can. 

 

PS

 

Small needle fish work well over here to.

 

Mike

 

 

 

 

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19 mins ago, Birdsnester said:

From everything I’ve read about UK fishing is that the angler needs to cast FAR because the slope is very gradual. That’s why pendulum casting is so popular there.  If you are looking at setups where the reel is close to the butt it’s because many Britts cast with the left hand on the reel if they are right handed.  It looks weird but lots of folks over there do it that way.  I’d stick with what’s natural to you and either build one yourself or buy a rod with a movable reel seat or no reel seat and just use coasters

Birdsnester.

 

Our Coast Line is very varied. We have shallow flat sand beaches , we have very steep sandy beaches. We also have shingle beaches usually these are very steep and we have boulder beaches and insanely rocky beaches covered in kelp. Also steep deep rocky shelves / platform rocks and deep ledges.

 

Long distance casting is thought and to be fair it can be as key to fishing  the flat sand beaches . But those beaches and In fact all of them do not hold the numbers or size of the fish they did many and I mean many years ago.

Cod fishing from the beach and long distance casting was the std tactic as preached by the angling journalists of the day. This lead to very stiff tournament derived  surf rods that did require a good deal of skill to extract the performance from them. As the rods got longer than the early short pendulum rods which were around 11 ‘ 8 inches  the reel position went from the high position typically  around 29 inches from butt end to Center line of spindle on a conventional reel to around 6 inches on long 13 foot plus rods. You just can’t control a conventional reel with a pendulum cast on very long very powerful rods unless the reel is in the low position. We only use this low position on these very long very powerful rods in the main when bait fishing,

 

The OP is talking about spinning rods. Different ball game.

Out Bass like Stripers can be and frequently are caught at very close range and in very shallow water. Those shallow sand beaches at night can have Bass cruising right in close in range of Fly Guys let alone spin guys who can cast 1 Oz plugs a very long way if needed.

We fish all types of ground for our Bass and same principles for locating them are the same as for your Stripers.

The best marks feature rocky weedy ground mostly shallow. Estuaries and points and sand bars. Current is good to have as well. Bass can be caught feet from the edge in these places.

 

mike

Edited by Mike Oliver
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Hi Guys.

 

Many thanks for the replies.  In order to keep the original post brief, I probably omitted some info.

 

I'm pretty experienced in UK fishing.  Yes I'm from Iowa, but moved here as a lad and have 30 plus years of UK bass fishing under my belt.

 

My question really related to heavy surf, when a long rod/high tip is required for line control.    No, we don't need quite the strength of outfit that stripers need, but often a nine foot rod casting 2oz poppets or metals is what the conditions demand, not the size of fish.  With such an outfit I find working a popper single handed kills my arm after an hour.  So I've been trying to mimic the retreive I see on stripervideos.  I can walk a patchinko all day on an 8 foot light outfit, but the extra weight and leverage of the heavier gear gets me.

 

I think you"ve answered my question.  Rod butt between legs, rod hand up the blank above the reel seat.  Can't do it with my existing rods, handle is too short, so off to mudhole for a blank and will spin one up myself.

 

Thanks again guys

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Iowa

 

Thanks. Ok I have done it both sides of the pond. I have two  Lami rods a GSB 132 1M and the 10 foot version. Both too heavy for our lures and fish but I learned a lot about Lure fishing 10 and 11 foot rods with the reel stem set at around 24 to 26 inches 

 

For fishing the rod between our legs and fishing surface  lures  American style where the rod is held pretty high up I much prefer 11 foot rods by a very long chalk. But that same rod if you bring down to the horizontal position is not an easy rod to fish.

 

If you were casting 1 Oz needles and poppers and two ounce metals and Bass Bullets whilst it is on the heavy side a Zziplex Lite Bass is a consideration,

I used mine in the US to cast Bucktails from 3/4 Oz to 3 ozs. It will cast surface lures well and tip is soft enough to WTD if not ideal on our lighter lures.

 

Another possibility  a fast actions carp blank in a 2 lb test  curve . If you can find one at 11 feet. They have  gone the same way as surf rods and some are.more like surf rods now.

 

CTS in NZ make excellent blanks but it is not easy buying from a catalogue.

 

I suspect MH blanks will be very different to the action and feel of the JDM product currently ruling the UK scene.

 

Mike

 

 

 

 

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