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i am a tackle whore...with my arsenal pushing maybe 50 setups right now and i got 5 special rods on order.
i am not that old, but i remember when all of our rods had long wooden butts and solid fiberglass tips. i remember breaking rods on tiderunner weakfish. but now the rods that you can go to kmart and buy for <$40 just blow me away. spend $80-100 and you can get some pretty sick production rods, compared to the rods of not that long ago.
in the past, to get a nice surf stick (like a 1 piece 10 fter) you had to go custom, but not even that's true anymore. so as far as i'm concerned, there is absolutely no need for a custom rod in pretty much every application.
having said that, fishing isn't really about need. a good custom rod is 100% of what you want. compared to production rods which are sometimes built close to what you want, not exactly but adequate.
in terms of numbers, i'd say about 20% of my rods are custom made.
but if you break it down by type, my collection is more like:
boat rods: 95% production, 5% custom
surf rods: 5% production, 95% custom
so why go custom? sometimes you don't want to settle for adequate.
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