Savage Gear SGS6 (Long Casting) 9’6’’ 10-35g lure rod review - wasn’t going to review this rod but it’s on sale at an amazing £99.99

I wasn’t going to bother reviewing this Savage Gear SGS6 (Long Casting) 9’6’’ 10-35g lure rod for any other reason than I have already reviewed the outstanding and “shares very similar DNA to this longer one” SGS6 9’ 7-35g version - review here. But when I was up at the Glasgow Angling Centre show the other day, on the second morning I found out that they were selling the longer SGS6 9’6’’ 10-35g version for an amazing price of £99.99, when the other rods in the range are well over £200+. This is a serious rod and I know that a bunch of lure anglers would get on really with it - hence this review. I have the rod at home, I have fished with the rod a good bit, so I took it back out fishing a couple of times to refamiliarise myself with it and write these words……….

I know the lad behind the blue coloured Savage Gear SGS6 range, and to be honest I only got to try a few of them out because somebody at Savage Gear took it upon themself to send me some to have a look at. They sat in a corner in their blue rod bags for a good while in the corner of my office until curiosity got the better of me. Rather glad I did, because I am in love with the shorter and utterly delightful SGS6 8’3’’ 12-42g (review here), I fell into the SGS6 9’ 7-35g (review here) because the APIA Foojin’RS Vivogue 96ML+ 9’6’’ 6-38g sort of made me do it (review of that APIA rod here), and here we have what Savage Gear call the “Long Casting” 9’6’’ 10-35g rod. It’s not the APIA Vivogue because that thing is pretty much unique, but for the silly sale price of £99.99 you can get a rod which I think shares a number of the good characteristics of a far more expensive lure rod. This SGS6 9’6’’ 10-35g also shares a lot of characteristics with that shorter SGS6 9’ 7-35g rod, so please make sure to read my review of it here because today’s review will make more sense when you have done so.

Rods are very personal things of course, but whatever style of lure rod you tend to prefer I simply can’t see how anybody could not go fishing very effectively with this thing. You just can’t go wrong, indeed it’s one of the “kindest” 9’6’’ all round lure rods I have fished with. Nothing is going to bite back at you if you don’t quite time every cast to perfection, and it’s a very easy rod to compress and frigging launch lures like proverbial missiles. The ML in the rod code is there on purpose - this rod has a rather lovely tip on it. It’s not too soft, but if you are more used to the sort of 9’6’’ lure rods a lot of us in the UK would fish with then it might take a bit of getting used to. Ten minutes in though and with how awesome this SGS6 9’6’’ rod is to cast, everything now feels very normal. Because it’s so bloody easy and precise and accessible.

The APIA Vivogue definitely opened me up to lure rods with tips on them as such, and although for the most part I am drawn to the sort of actions on lure rods which so many of seem to like, a slightly “easier” tip makes a lot of sense to me when you’re out fishing instead of waggling a rod and muttering intelligent sounding stuff - the “ML” bit of the rod name. I don’t really care what you chuck on this SGS6 9’6’’ rod up to about 30g, it just works, and then I can easily step up to say the 35g Surf Seeker and the rod is still singing. A lad I know uses this rod for most of his shore jigging style bass fishing on the Norfolk coastline because he loves how ridiculously far he can cast various jigs, and he loves how the tip makes it so easy and effective to work them.

There is also enough give in the butt section to make winding something like the Xorus Patchinko II surface lure a breeze. Again a part of me thinks that a bit of a stiffer tip should technically make it easier to work a surface lure like this at range, but then I fish with this SGS6 9’6’’ rod doing exactly that - and it’s a dream. A smaller surface lure like the lovely little Savage Gear Surf Walker 2.0 12.5cm F9.5g flies out on this thing, and without a doubt the subtlety in the rod is helping you here. Soft plastics rigged to swim and twitch are pretty effortless, and whilst I’m not going to buy a lure rod like this for the bulk of my surf fishing, with how easy it is to get metals out a frigging mile I do find myself examining my thought processes sometimes. The word effortless keeps coming up in my head when I fish with this rod.

The handle’s good, the guides are good, and via working around a lot of different anglers via my photography and guiding work, I know how an easy to fish with rod like this SGS6 9’6’’ would work well for a lot of anglers. Don’t mistake the word easy though for sloppy, because this rod is not like that at all - it’s “Long Casting” because it’s so efficient to get at the power. You don’t have to have a degree in casting to get lures out there. I have fished this rod with a few different spinning reels and it seems to be pretty comfortable with most things. I can’t help but love the Penn Slammer IV 2500 reel on this rod, but bear in mind I love this spinning reel already and I don’t obsess about the lightest possible reels. A lovely light reel like the Shimano Vanford C5000 or 4000 is awesome on this rod as well.

This is a hell of a lot of serious lure fishing rod which has become a whole lot more serious because it’s on offer at such an amazing price. My understanding is that Glasgow Angling Centre (their website is FishingMegastore) were offered a bunch of these specific SGS6 9’6’’ 10-35g lure rods not long after Pure Fishing became the owners of Savage Gear, hence the serious sale price. I love the fact that we can buy ever better fishing tackle for less money these days, but I can’t recall fishing with a lure rod this good which is now available for a penny under £100. Money no object and I’m going for that APIA Vivogue, but wow this SGS6 9’6’’ 10-35g rod is really rather good…………….

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