Tackle Breakdown: Evergreen Combat Rat

Video Transcript

We're talking rats. Evergreen combat rat. One of the more popular big baits out there, especially in the West Coast, has been the rat style swim baits. These things do get bit very well. I can tell you this when they came out with them at the shows and everywhere I went on a national scale, people were freaking out over these things. Not as big a deal up here in Minnesota, even though we have a lot of forage that actually matches this. I'm sure we have rats, but for sure have little musk rats and things of that nature swimming around the water that definitely do get eaten. I've actually seen some bass weight in internments with musk rats in their throat. So it does happen. So it is a cool bait, fun bait to throw. It is a little heavier than your traditional bass or shimlours. So can you get away with throwing it on regular bass or shim equipment? Yes, if it's on the very heavy end, but I wouldn't make a super big habit of it . If it's something to get you buying a jam, no big deal at all, to throw it on a flipping stick or a frog rod or something like that, because 2.5 ounces isn't that bad at all. But I'll say if you're going to do it regularly, you want the proper equipment. There's things like this Sankrai Rod swim bait Avenger here. This is in the Victory lineup. This thing is rated for up to 5 ounces, which that will cover you on a lot of today's most popular baits that are more mainstream. Not so big and giant that you need a dedicated mega heavy swim bait rod. But this thing would basically get you by the lot of stuff. I know we have that Spro rod here as well that's designed for the Chad Chad. That's perfectly good for throwing something like this. You're going to want to reel with a little bit more line capacity, a little bit more meat to it too, like the Corado 200 is one of the more popular swim bait reels here. You can get all the 20, 25 pound test fluorocarbon you want on there. And certainly you could do that with the big Ttula 300 I should say. This has been one of the more popular swim bait reels in the last year for us here at OmniFishing. When you're throwing the rat, I've asked a couple rat aficionados of late and they've stated that actually throwing it on big game or braid with a big game or a big fluorocarbon leader is kind of something that they've been deploying. Which is kind of crazy to think about, but you do fish this bait on the surface really. It's not a top water. It's more of a subsurface walking bait. So I guess it's technically top water. But having a line that's more buoyant in the water column makes a lot of sense actually. It does right if you throw a fluorocarbon if you're constantly moving it, I wouldn't probably switch up from the fluorocarbon that I would be running with this. But if you're going to kill it a lot, let it sit there for a long period of time over like target areas or something like that. That big game mono or some braided line to probably do the trick. Ask any musky angler out there. Braed works on all big baits. So check out this evergreen combat rat if you want to do something fun, look for more trophy sized fish and just have a blast out there on the water. Go catch them