Home Forums Fishing Freshwater Catfish rod

I recently got into catfishing with a friend of mine. The problem I’m running into is the gear. I have several g loomis and st croix rods. We use spinning gear to toss weightless chicken livers. My equipment is too light for some of the fish we tangle with. He uses ugly sticks but they’re like fishing with a golf club. Yea I’m spoiled. Any suggestions of rods that have some sense of feel and lightweight?

For channel cats , I only use fiberglass poles that are limber at the tip. A 7' rod good for 20 lb test is a good bet. I have ugly sticks 7' that are good for about 15 lbs. Those are my stink bait rods and walleye rods for trolling. They also make excellent cut bait rods . My reels are Abu Garcia 6500. If you ever get into flatheads , I use 2 Ocean Masters salt water rods with roller tips. My reels are a Penn 113 Senator and another Penn gls 45 ? reel that is not a level wind. This is for putting bait like 10" suckers or bull heads up stream from a big brush pile near deep water. . I set the drag with a pilers or they will get in that brush and be gone.

My catfish rigs take a beating slinging big weights and big baits, plus getting banged around fishing at night and getting put in rod holders.

So like the iHookem, I only fish glass rods. They’re tougher and they’re also cheaper for when not if I bust one.

My current favorites are the Daiwa Beefkitty conventional rods. They have a very soft tip that works great with circle hooks. I also have some Meathunter rods that are okay, very well constructed but the price has went up and their CS was nonexistent when I needed it.

Catfishing is a brute force game to me, pitching half a gizzard shad or a crappie head for 40-60 pound fish calls for medieval gear.

Lamiglas x-11 with carbon handles. You can pick the length/strength you want and the handles are easy to clean if you’re messing with stinky bait. Also come out of the rod holder easier.

I use the X-11 7’9” twitching rod. It’s rated 8-15#. It was designed to fish jigs for salmon, but is actually a great bait rig rod for catfish. Before anyone talks about “soft salmon rods”, I’ve pulled big lingcod out of holes with this rod.

Same take here, stuff gets banged around and occasionally broken fishing from a little aluminum tub in very muddy rivers early in the morning or at night, so I'm not going put a lot of dollars into my catfish rigs.

It's not really a finesse game, so the weight doesn't really matter since the rods are just sitting in a holder or against the side of the boat waiting on a bite 90% of the time.

My personal favorites were the older Berkley Big Games, back when you could still get them in 6'&6'6" lengths. They haven't made those in quite a while now, though, and I'm down to my last couple of them.

Ugly Stiks, King Kats, hell even just a cheap Shakespeare/Zebco/Ozark Trail glass rod from Wallyworld all get the job done for modest sized cats.

I got my kid one of those cheapazz Shakespeare Durangos for slinging stinkbait rigs a couple years ago, and it works suprisingly well for a $9 pos 🤷‍♂️ He's landed quite a few with it and it hasn't snapped yet... no monsters or anything, but a lot of run of the mill stinkbait sized (around here) 4-7# channels.