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by Thad Rains
Several years ago, I asked a custom rod builder to build me the PERFECT crankbait rod. I needed it to be well-balanced, light, long, durable, with a variable weighting system for fishing different situations. The rod builder came up with the ingenious idea of marrying a stiff (musky) spinning rod with a traditional casting butt section. This combination was called the “Hawg Bone” rod for fishing big deep diving crankbaits for long periods of time. The eight-foot rod was mandatory, to maximize the casting distance which allowed the crankbait to get down as deep as possible. The whip of the more flexible spinning rod allowed the lure to get a great deal of speed coming off of the initial cast and could carry for very long distances. I wanted these rods built on quality blanks, so the St. Croix Avid series was selected, for it durability, quality and lifetime warranty. Well, that was quite some time ago. NOW, there are one piece traditional casting rods that can be used without having to think outside of the box. George Roth contacted me to see if I was interested in comparing some of the new rods to my old system and to write an article about my findings.
First off, George Roth is a FANTASTIC rod builder located in Idaho. If you ever get the chance to use one of his rods, DO SO. His rods are not only exceedingly well crafted, but a work of art as well. I gave him my specifications and what I was looking for, and he came up with two versions for me to test. Both of them were built using the Shikari one piece eight foot casting rods. The lighter version, on a P803 blank, for throwing shallow and medium diving crankbaits and the P804 blank, for use with the heavier, deeper diving crankbaits. Both worked well for each situation that I tested them with, some even far exceeding some of the advertisements and claims. I’ll begin by telling you the characteristics I prefer in my crankbait rods, then I’ll tell you the specifics on how each rod performed.
Normally I use a medium/heavy rod with a fast tip. I want something that is NOT parabolic, but more of a rod described by Dion Hibdon as being 70/30. Seventy percent backbone and thirty percent tip or give. My preference is more along the lines of an 80/20 or 75/25 or even 85/15. My ideal rods are close to 82/18 or 83/17 ratios. I set my reel up to compensate for the lack of perceived flexibility. That’s so the fish do not pull the hooks through their mouths. With today’s technology in reel manufacturing, there is no need to have an extremely limber rod, unless you just want one. I use 17 lb McCoy’s Mean Green test for most of my crankbait situations. I occasionally move up to 20 or down to 12 lb, depending on what lure I am fishing and where I am fishing. The McCoy’s line is not a monofilament, but a copolymer, so it has added characteristics that really give it an edge for my techniques. It is manufactured with silicone in the resin, so it does not have the stiffness or memory that many lines have. It also is a smaller diameter than similar tests, so it has less friction than a 17 lb standard test. The line also has a very GOOD amount of stretch to it, coupled with great abrasion resistance and you end up with almost a perfect line for what I want to use for crankbaits.
My current Hawg Bone rods (telescoping) are built on a St. Croix Avid musky casting rod blank married to a casting butt section. This gives me the control and MOST of the sensitivity I like to have using the deep diving crankbaits. I need to refine my crankbait technique a little bit to adjust to the Shikari P804 for the deep diving crankbaits, but not much. Until George built the Shikari rods for me, I was completely happy with my current rods, but now, I know there is something with superior sensitivity that is lighter weight, so all plusses My light crankbait rod is the Lite Bone, using the same telescoping rod technique, but with a lighter casting rod for the body.
My rods are nearly all eight foot long, for several reasons. First, you can cast an extra long distance with them. The added ten to 100 ft of line out allows the crankbait to run longer in the water, and if the lure is tuned properly, dig down deeper in the water column and get the bait deeper than the average weekend anglers bait. Getting the bait designed to run from 6 – 8 ft down to 9 or 10 ft is a real advantage. This gets the lure down where the fish may have never SEEN that bait and that’s definitely something different. Secondly, the longer rods give me a lot more control of what is happening with the bait. I can have the lure track further away from the boat by pointing my rod to the side and letting the bait run as much as 6 to 7 ft away from the boat itself. Third, when a fish bites, I have more leverage to work the fish away from cover or structure. If you are fishing in a small space, however, the rods will not work at all, because they are just too long. But, normally, fishing a crankbait is used for more open spaces. The times I would go to a shorter crankbait rod would be fishing around docks or boat houses, when you need to pitch or roll cast your bait to specific areas. And finally, the eight-foot rods give me a HUGE advantage in FEELING exactly what the bait is doing. I can feel the bait working from muck, to silt, to mud, to sand, to gravel, to brush and to gravel. Due to the sensitivity of the tips, many times, I can feel the different composition of what material makes up the bottom of a lake, which allows me to concentrate on the area where I am catching fish. For instance, if the fish are holding off of the riprap, but between the sand and the muck, in the silt, I can concentrate my casts just on that particular area. It doesn’t work all of the time, but it works enough for me to continue with a good amount of success.
Here is an example of what a difference in feeling can do to help to catch more fish. It happened December 10, 2005 in our club Classic. My partner had been fishing one of his favorite crankbaits, on which he had caught several large fish. He was using his standard crankbait set up with a 7 ft rod, while I was using my 8 ft rods. The fish were not active that day and you had to coax them into hitting your lure. He complained that he could not feel the fish. The fish were actually hitting the bait, but in a swiping motion and not taking it fully into their mouths. We only caught two of our eight fish with the bait completely in their mouths. The others had only one or no hooks in their mouths. The two biggest fish of the day, a 5.06 and a 3.23 actually engulfed the bait, but they were the only ones. Yes, we switched colors often, but with little difference in the results. When his big fish hit, he did not even feel the fish on the line for about 6.5 to 7 cranks of the reel, because he lacked the sensitivity in his rod, even though it is a medium action rod. All of the fish we caught came when the lure was paused or bounced off of the cover we were fishing. Three of the fish I caught did not even have a hook in their mouth, but had both treble hooks along the side of the gill plate. I could feel the fish slapping or rushing at the bait and had the opportunity to set the hook and foul hook them. We were not sight fishing, so this was not against any rules of the club. Once my partner remarked that he could not feel the lure working as he thought it should, so I watched his rod tip and line to see if I could help in any way. I saw at least 4 other strikes that he missed, because he was not in the “ZONE” of fishing the crankbait. I had to tell him to set the hook a couple of times, but unfortunately the fish had already retreated and were not hooked. One other thing I told him to do. “SET THE HOOK!” Many people seem to be afraid of ripping the hooks out of the fish’s mouth or missing the fish altogether, but unless you get good hook penetration, you will lose MANY crankbait fish, due to the of the lack of pressure to properly set the hook. It does not take much, but at least do not let the fish set the hook themselves by swimming away with your lure.
Now as to the rods, the lighter P803 is a dream to handle. Weighing only 4.5 ounces, it practically does not exist in the hand. It has a great action for lighter crankbaits, topwater lures as well as weightless presentations or even drop shot techniques. I could load the rod up and cast a country mile with a medium running crankbait, or I could cast an unweighted soft plastic 5” stick bait on a 2/0 hook about 35 to 40 yards with it, using a Shimano Curado 200B5 reel. It is a perfect action for all of these applications. You can feel a fish breathe on a soft plastic bait with this set up.
I LOVE the P803 for the delicate touch that it has and the immediacy of the feeling you get while fishing it. You are hooked up as if YOU are the crankbait. I do not know how it would handle a BIG fish, but it should do well, as long as you do not try to horse the fish to the boat. It is more of a parabolic curve than an 80-20 rod that I like to fish. Normally, for lighter applications, I like a rod that is 77% body or stiffer and 23% tip, indicating a fast tip, but stronger body. The Shikari P803 is more of a 60% body and 40% tip combination. Perhaps not that much, but pretty close to that. Because the rod is built in one piece, the tip is progressively less stiff the closer you get to the end. It is a progressively accentuating curve that will allow you to put a great amount of strain on it, without compromising the internal strength of the rod. Both Shikari rods exhibit these characteristics. I can imagine using this rod in ALL situations that touch or feel is desired. Drop shot, top water, small crankbaits, light spinnerbaits, weightless soft plastics and even a fle-fly application.
The Shikari P804 is identical to the P803, except that it is designed to handle larger baits. It is not quite as parabolic as the P803, but built a little stiffer than the Bass Pro Shops Crankin’ Stick (a composite rod). It is more conducive to throwing baits that dive up to twelve foot. When I used it for the deep divers (DD14, DD22, Stanford Big “C”, Poe’s 400, Rapala Down Deep and a few others) it had a little bit too much tip for my taste. I had to adjust my crankbait technique so I did not POWER the crankbait through the water column but instead, finessed the bait through the areas. Normally, the crankbait is a power presentation, but it can be finessed. Most of my crankbait fishing is finesse fishing, but I still like a rod that has a body that is longer and a tip that is shorter. It has been at least four or five years since I ripped the hooks out of a fish’s mouth, so I trust that I have my setup adjusted to the correct parameters to prevent that with the 100% graphite rods.
I FINALLY caught a 5 lb bass on the P804!! It handled the job VERY well. I was somewhat surprised at how well it handled the fish. I was using it to throw a light balsa Dee Bait in shad color around submerged grass on 17 lb Red Wolf monofilament (Berkley) spooled on a Shimano Curado 201 reel. We had to make LONG casts along and beside the grass line and the bites came on the first 4 or 5 cranks, as the bait hit a strand of grass that just stuck a little further out than the rest. We caught 6 fish in about 1.5 hours, but only 3 keepers, but a 7-11, 5-01 and a 2-14 spot will make you feel good about fishing in the rain.
I was also amazed at how well the P804 threw the LIGHT little crankbaits. My partner said that it sounded like I was setting the hook on every cast, because I was having to force it through the wind and try to get as far out there as I could. Making casts in the range of 25 to 40 yards is no light task when your bait weighs less than one quarter of an ounce. So, I can say that I LOVE the Shikari rods, but wish they had a few more characteristics in them, more like my current rods, more backbone and a little less tip.. The sensitivity is fantastic as well as the lightness of the rod. I just wish that the P804 had a touch more backbone than the more parabolic curve it provides. Why was I using the maximum amount of line weight and a fast speed reel for shallow running light weight crankbaits? Because it felt like the right presentation to be making for the fish to bite, and it was the correct decision to make. This is considered a POWER/FINESSE presentation. Similar to ripping a rat-l-trap style bait through grass, but different in that you had to be able to FEEL the individual grass stems that the fish were concentrated on. A stiff rod that would be used for ripping rat-l-trap style baits would usually, not have that amount of sensitivity, so this Shikari P804 rod was PERFECT for that presentation. I may not use the rod much if fishing the really deep diving baits, but I would put it in the category to fish the baits that dive to 12 ft or less. This is a great compliment to my stiffer rods for deep diving crankbaits. I had to refine my technique for using it for the really deep diving crankbaits, but it still worked well. The Shikari rods are by far superior to the composite Bass Pro Shops Crankin’ Stick. They do not make an eight foot Crankin’ Stick, but a seven and one half foot telescoping rod. They are also superior to most of the other crankbait rods on the market, because of the sensitivity and lightweight construction.
Overall I prefer the Shikari P803 for light weight crankbaits and where I need to feel the bait working an area, and the Shikari P804 for crankbaits that are designed to dive to 12 feet, but where I still need the feel and control in the rod. I think I still prefer my two piece Hawg Bone for the deeper diving crankbaits, as you just can’t beat them for controlling and the deep diving crankbaits. But, I to, can learn how to finesse fish deep diving crankbaits, vs. power fishing with them. Of the rods I have used, I prefer the Shikari rods because of the lightweight one-piece design and the amount of sensitivity that they provide.
Article update: It was announced on 10-5-06 that Shikari had been purchased by Advanced Tubular Composites (ATC) of Wenatchee, WA.. I have been assured by Fred Gasparach, head of Sales and Marketing for ATC, that the blanks that Thad described in his article will continue to be available. GR