Speckled Trout on Glass!

Cabelas CGR. Okuma SVL. Speckled Trout

I finally got the chance to put a fish on my Cabelas GCR (Custom Glass Rod), and it was fantastic!

With the recent warm weather, I'd been thinking about finding some bluegills to test out the new fiberglass rod.  There's a trail near my house that parallels the very upper reaches of a bayou, and I decided to check it out, expecting the water to be mostly fresh that far up the bayou.  In fact when I first got the hit and realized it was pulling a bit too much to be a bluegill, I thought it must be a bass!  Boy was I surprised when I pulled a speck into the shallows.  He eagerly devoured an unweighted, black woolly bugger, and put quite the bend in the 6'6" 4wt.  I've been telling people he fought harder than the black drum I caught this weekend!

To be honest, the rod has taken some getting used to.   Much of my fishing these days involves casting as far as humanly possible with my relatively stiff 8 wt while double hauling and shooting large amounts of line.  Picking up the tiny 4 wt is a very odd feeling, and getting any sort of distance out of the rod is difficult.  I'd also never cast a rod this short before, so that took some adjusting as well.  But as soon as I backed off on power and lengthened my stroke slightly, I found that the rod handles short casts beautifully, which, of course, is what its meant for, and the line lands with hardly a ripple on the surface.  It will be a great small stream rod, and I am looking forward to trying it out on some real trout this summer.