How To Protect Your Fishing Rods for Travel- Daiwa Tech Tips

Today I just want to run through some tips on preparing rods for travel. There's nothing worse than jumping in a plane with a rod tube, getting to your destination, and then finding out that one of your rods is broken and then it can basically ruin a trip for you. So it's definitely important to make sure that your rods are packed properly and I'll run you through a few tips here to make sure that your rods get to your destination in one piece.

Getting Tubed

So a few things that you will need is obviously a rod tube. They come in a few different shapes and sizes. They've got square, round, accordion style, where they sort of pull out and other ones that have sort of a door on the top. This one's a sport tube, so it's square.

I like the square ones because they accommodate really large guides. So if you're traveling with like big blue water rods, these ones are really good. Often the rounder tubes minimize the amount of rods you can fit. This particular one, I think it can fit 15 rods or something like that in it, so it's quite spacious. I have been using the Daiwa rod socks. These are really good because they're very lightweight. So some of your other rod bags are quite thick, so they're made of neoprene and they actually do weigh a little bit. So a lot of the time when you're traveling to a remote location on a plane, you might only have 23 kilos of bag allowance. So by using a thicker rod bag you're actually minimizing the amount of weight that you can take in tackle and terminals and that sort of stuff.

A Light Jacket

So using a really lightweight option, which still gives your rod great protection, I think is a much better option. And it just enables you to take a lot more tackle on your trip, be a little bit more organized and potentially catch you more fish. And also one other thing is I just use a standard towel, just to give a bit of padding in there. So I'll run you through how I pack them.

One of the key factors is the fact that the lighter rods ... if you take, say going up north, for example, I've got a couple of bait casters here and a couple of blue water rods, one piece and two piece. So a one piece rod, for example, has a really nice soft tip. This one, a little bait caster. So that is particularly fragile. Whereas the other end of the road is nice and thick.

So this particular end is not fragile at all. So that can be banging up against the end of your rod tube, no worries. If this end, if you've got movement in your rods and that this slides up onto the end of the rod tube, that's potentially going to break, especially if you've got another few rods in there pushing that down. So what you can do to minimize that risk is say, for example, on a two-piece rod like this one. So you've got soft tip at the top, but then at the bottom end, you have a very, very thick part of the blank. If you actually layer those two items, so you have your tip sitting below the thicker part of the rod on your secondary rod and you actually wrap those together with some rod wraps like these ones, if that hits the end of the rod tube, then this part is going to take all the impact.

Protecting the Tip

And you're not going to have any issues with rod breakages. So I'll just run you through how to do that. It's fairly straight forward, but it can definitely save you some hassles on a trip. There's nothing worse than rocking up and finding out you've got a broken rod. So with your rod tubes ... sorry, your rod socks just chuck them on the rod. So there are varying lengths, a lot of our range of Daiwa rods now are coming with these rod socks as standard. So your Tatula rod series, the Zero, TD Black, for example, they all come with rod socks. So it's really, really handy, makes it really easy for travel.

So slide them in like that. So these are the bait cast ones. So as you can see, they're a lot thinner. So they accommodate those smaller bait cast guides. And there are some ones for spin as well. So the spin ones, obviously are a lot wider to accommodate the larger stripping guide like these ones. So slide these on. It's very straightforward and you see they're made out of a stretching material. So they do actually expand a little bit and they will slide up over those guides. So they're not terribly thick, but they definitely do create a little bit of a buffer to make sure that you're not damaging your blanks with the other guides on the rod. So as you can see the guide protrudes out a lot, it's quite a large piece. So if that's sitting up against another one of your blanks and banging around in the tube.

Getting Guided

Just bare guide on bare blank it can do a little bit of damage. But just by putting these over the top, it definitely does alleviate that. And obviously got a few two-piece rods there as well. So we do have just some butt sections. So the butt sections, we can just wrap them together with another rod wrap and then throw them in the tube afterwards and that's fine. So as you can see there, we have all of our rods in the rod socks, ready to go in the tube. So basically what I'll do now is just get the towel and just roll that out.

So this is just to add a little bit more protection and a lot of the times when you go on a trip, you need a towel anyway, so it's quite handy. So say for example, this one, this is that lighter Tatula rod, which has a nice soft tip on it. So what you want to do is just lay them out and then get one of the rods with a heavier butt end, so a thicker butt end. So this is a Spartan rod and have that sitting. So it sits just a little bit higher in your arrangement there. So it just sits a little bit higher and then you do the same. So this one here also has a softer tip. This is another Tatula Swimbait rod. It's not as soft as that lighter one, but it's definitely still fragile. So you just lay that in a similar position and then this one, another two piece rod, which has a nice thick butt, you could switch out around the other way and then lay that in.

Swapping Ends

So that also sits nice and short. You'll see, on the other side here, we've got that Tatula rod butt on the one piece rod, which is quite thick. So because that one is quite thick and that's going to be butting up against the end of the tube, so that's fine. So what you can do then is just wrap the rods up in the tail. So you can go either layered so you can wrap one and then go wrap another like so. Like that, and then make sure that one's sitting at a good height and then wrap the third and fourth rods like that. So it's all wrapped up in that towel, that middle section, where all the main guides are, there is more buffer in between, so you're not going to be damaging any of your items. So now with your rod wrap, what you want to do is just wrap up the tips of the rods.

So just want to wrap the rod wrap around the tips like that. And as you can see there, you've got your tips down here so you can adjust that slightly. So you don't have so much space, obviously the length of a rod tube, however long it is, there might be restrictions on a plane. So you need to make sure that they are as short as possible while still maintaining protection. So you can see there, you've got your hard section there and your soft tips here. So if something hits the end of that, it's not going to do any damage to your tips. Same thing goes on the other end.

Don't Forget Your Towel

So because this one's a little bit thick, I'm going to wrap this one on the towel like so. Same thing, you've got that thick Tatula butt there, so that's what's going to be hitting the end, so it's very simple. I do have a third little rod wrap here, so I'm just going to wrap up the other side of this towel. Just like so. So as you can see there, it's really, really compact.

So considering the size of some of the rods that are in there, so you've got your guides here, sort of alternating those larger guides so they're both facing opposite directions, so they're not going to be hitting each other and also minimizing the amount of space that it takes up on the tube. Nice hard end on this end and also a nice hard end on this end. So if you put that in the tube and it's banging around, nothing's going to break. So it's very important to make sure that you've just got the hard end in your tubes. So what you want to do then is obviously put it in the tube. So this one is a sort of an accordion style, so it's got two segments which come together so as you can see there, it's nice and open. And that's the other side, which is just the top there. So I'll just put that down here.

Protecting the End

So what you want to do, these ones have got a little bit of foam in the bottom end, just so there's a little bit of protection. So essentially just sliding that rod all the way in there. You can wrap these rod butts depending on how much space is in your rod tube. What I often do is I actually just put them in here like this, and then depending on how much space I have, because I travel with a lot of camera equipment, generally, I'm a little bit limited in what I can take as far as clothes. So a lot of the time, I actually just stuff, a lot of my clothes inside my rod tube to minimize movement as well. So once you've done that, so you've got your rod in there, it's butted all the way down to the bottom. And as you can see at the top here, you've still got no tips protruding, and you just want to slide the top of your rod tube on, bring them all together like so.

Now this is very important, this part. So you don't want any movement in your rod tube, but you don't want to push down too hard that you're going to break something. So if you just slide your rod tube until you find that firm stop, and then a lot of them will have little different holes, so you can adjust them at different heights.

Nice'n Snug

So if we just have a look, get it down to a height where it's not going to be pushing the rods back into each other and exposing one of those tips, and then just simply lock it up like so. And once you've done that, so you've got your rod tube, no movement. If you shake it around, there's no movement inside, so you can't hear it shaking. That's very, very important. Now, if that's handled in a bad way by a baggage handler or something like that, none of your rods are going to break. So you can take this on trip and not have any fears that you're going to rock up, and one of your rods is going to be broken. So I hope that's helpful. Definitely give it a try.

 

Meet Brett Habener
Daiwa Digital and Creative Manager 

One of three Queenslanders in the Daiwa Australia Marketing Team Brett brings to the team extensive retail, wholesaler, digital and content creation experience. Our most experienced in-house videographer, editor, and graphic designer, Brett is a high skilled angler, having spent years fishing remote, high class fishing destinations.