Hey Rob, in your review you mention the weight of this bait being an issue (if you don't have the right setup). Now that you have used the Daiwa Big Bait rod do you think it's adequate? Anyone else throwing this kind of weight with this rod? I haven't had anything bigger then the 9" Slammer on the other end.

I would say ... it's marginal. I need to weigh all the baits still for the reviews, but live trout softbait is pretty heavy. Could you throw it on the Diawa, yeah you could, but it's pushing it. To me, with a light rod and a big bait, I feel like I can't move the fish on the hookset very good. Like sometimes the fish will hit you and pull the rod down and get off so quick you can't believe it. That seems to happen to me more if my rod is too light. If the bait is lighter, I can move the rod better. Hard to explain.

Overall that Diawa rod isn't bad at all though. It throws the 7 and 9" Slammers no problem. Any of the moderate to light baits should be fine on it.

Thanks, that helps. It doesn't feel like I could go much heavier then the 9" Slammer on that rod, but I don't have anything to compare it too. That's the heaviest swimbait rod I've used.

Cool - yeah you are about right on the rod. It'll handle most 9" stuff but not the solid rubber 9" that have a lot of pull to them in the water.

Hey, another one to check out is going to be the Okuma swimbait rod. Mark was demo-ing it when he got those fish in the pics below and I made a few casts with it. It's got muscle to it, and nice components. They're going to retail for $89 and that's the first rod I've seen in that price range that has that good of a feel to it, and can easily fish the big heavy baits. A lot of the so-called swimbait rods on the market are just worm and jig rods that are marked as being for swimbaits. This rod is made for swimbaits from the ground up because Mark is designing it and he knows what's up. It sure has taken the bigger mfgrs a long time to come around on the swimbait stuff.