About Rogue: Located just a few steps away from the famous Rogue River, Rogue Rods was founded in 2001 by Craig Lausmann. Although the company is fairly young, the Rogue team has plenty of experience in both fishing and rod building. The team consists of avid anglers and well known guides that spend countless hours on the water. With their combined knowledge and expertise their input is taken into consideration in the design of each and every new Rogue rod.

The Rogue drop shot rod uses a very sensitive rod blank

Impressions: Do you recall the first time you held a rod and as you grasped the handle and gave it a nice whip to test the action you were instantly taken back by the quality the craftsmanship? While it doesn't happen often, that's exactly how I felt the first time I held this Rogue rod. The Rogue Drop Shot MAX DS rod is unique in design, and quite unlike any other drop shot rod I have ever cast. The drop shot rod uses their impressive graphite blank that provides great action and offers up excellent sensitivity. In addition this spinning rod uses 8 quality Recoil^® guides plus the tip. Most eye-catching of all is the RoGrip handle composed of woven graphite, which looks like straight out of a race car shift knob rather than a fishing rod handle.

   
RoGrip: With Rogue rods you have an option when it comes to handles. Either the standard cork material or you can choose to have the new and exciting RoGrip Graphite Handle package that Rogue offers for many of their rods. Instead of traditional cork you now have a very lightweight and extremely durable woven graphite tube in its place. The RoGrip was developed after professional guides that used Rogue rods wanted something that was even more sensitive and lightweight, and at the same time have a material that wouldn't easily get dirty nor fall apart over time. The RoGrip's only real downside is that Rogue requires a lead time of 60 days to build the custom rod for you. We were eager to see if it was worth the wait.

RoGrip is composed of a thin woven graphite tube that makes up the foregrip and handle

Field Tests: Applying the drop shot technique can be done throughout the year and not only on fish that are suspended. We paired the Rogue Drop Shot rod up with our trusty Quantum Catalyst PTi in the ultralight 10 size and targeted largemouth bass at various local lakes.

Not five minutes into our test we landed our first suspended bass

Application: We usually bring this section up towards the end of the review, but with this product it belongs at the beginning to understand what this rod is all about. Rogue designs rods very technique specific. So technique specific in fact that we found throughout our test we couldn't and wouldn't use it for anything else. While the rod is capable of casting darter heads the rod is weighted in such a way that it really only feels right when fishing a drop shot rig. Like an exotic sports car this rod is really designed to do one thing....and do that one thing very well.

The RoGrip handle might feel short for many anglers, this is because it is weighted in such a way that you are holding the reel on the foregrip, but you won't be casting much with this rod

Casting: Because this is a drop shot specific rod we didn't expect it would cast well, and that's exactly what we experienced during our field tests. When gripping the spinning rod for casting it becomes tip heavy and feels like you're throwing the rod out with each good swing. The best way to cast this rod is by pitching when not fishing directly underneath you. At seven feet in length we found this rod pitched quite well even with a small weight at the end of four pound test Sufix Elite line.