The other day I found a small bright green 4′ Shakespeare spinning rod at my parent’s house that didn’t have a reel attached to it. Curious about how fun it would be to use I bought a Shimano Sienna 500 spinning reel and spooled it with 4# line. The outfit, despite looking a bit ridiculous, felt good and I couldn’t wait to try it out. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt excited about gear fishing.

College is when I started to get into fishing and like most anglers learning how to fish I started off with a spinning rod. My fishing buddy and I mostly targeted bass throwing soft baits like senkos for largemouth bass. I would dabble with a few bait fishing trips for stocked trout but other than that I didn’t really get to learn how to truly fish before getting into fly fishing.

I caught quite a few fish with soft plastics but eventually got bored and wanted to try and expand my arsenal. I always thought hardbaits were cool but I had no confidence in them with the exception of classic topwater lures like poppers. As a poor college student hardbaits were tough to justify buying because if you happened to accidentally snag one or break one off you’d be out +5 or even +10 dollars. I had a few but I was often too afraid about using them because they were expensive. Losing a few of my favorite flies doesn’t bother me because I know I can easily replace them by tying more however losing my favorite hardbait means having to buy a replacement.

Now as a real adult with some extra spending money I can finally buy all the hardbaits I want and that is exactly what I did. Through fly fishing I now have an advance understand of fish behavior that I probably would’ve never learned if I had stuck to using a spinning rod. I was curious to see if I could use this knowledge to fill in the gap that I left when switching to fly fishing.

I bought a TFO panfish series 6’6” two piece rod and paired it with a Shimano Sienna 500 spinning reel with 8# fluorocarbon. The rod is considered an ultra light rod and feels great. I had to look through a bunch of different spinning rods because I didn’t want one that had too thick of a butt and the TFO panfish rod’s butt was perfect. Nice and thin.

I’ve been getting a bit bored of fly fishing the same rivers, holes, runs, etc so changing it up a bit will be a fun new learning experience.