Best Beginner Trout Rod (20 of 35)
What’s the best fly rod for trout if you’re just starting out? What is the best all-around fly rod for trout? Luckily, they are both the same—a 9-foot rod that calls for a 5-weight line. This rod will work just fine in any size trout stream, from small streams to big rivers. It’s also fine for fishing lakes and ponds. And if you’re inclined to chase other species, it will handle bass and panfish as long as you don’t use very large streamers and bass bugs. But smaller bugs and streamers up to about a size 6 are fine with this rod and it will handle bass up to five pounds with ease.
Video Transcript:
What kind of rod should I stow? What's a basic trout rod? What should your first rod be? My suggestion would be a nine-foot five-weight rod, it'll do just about anything for you. You can throw nymphs with indicators, you can throw streamers, you can throw big dry flys and small dry flys. I'm standing here in a river, beautiful river, and I've got a lake behind me, and I can fish all this water, the lake, and the river, or a small stream if I want with this nine-foot five-weight.
First of all, five-weight is a great all-around line size, it'll deliver the size trout flys that we use 95 percent of the time. Nine-foot rod is a great length, it's got enough reach so that you can hold your line off the water if you have to sometimes, and if you need to mend line, a nine-foot is a good length, yet the nine-foot length is really good in the wind, you can get to a longer rod but a longer rod has more rod and more line in the air, and if you have problems with wind, longer rods gonna give you more trouble so a nine-footer is just a great length.
So if you want one trout rod to start or you just want one trout rod to use yearly every place, a nine-foot five-weight is gonna do it, it's the rod for you.
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