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Daiwa Wise Stream Rods

The Daiwa Wise Stream rods were designed with two primary goals in mind: portability and great casting feel.

For portability, all the Wise Stream rods are either three piece or telescopic. Personally, I think portability is a very important feature in a rod designed for stream fishing.

In most places, the best fishing is not right next to the road! Being able to break down or collapse the rod to a convenient length is very nice. For backpacking or bike-packing (or traveling) a rod that  packs down to 23" (53UL-3), or 19.25" (45UL-3), or just 17" (50TUL) is a huge advantage over a two piece rod!

For casting feel, particularly with the three-piece rods, the Daiwa designers adjusted the material and hardness for each of the three sections. When you pick up and wiggle the rods, they will feel a bit stiff. That feeling is misleading. The butt section gives you all the stiffness you would want to fight a fish in current. The middle section provides a very smooth transition and the tip section is fast enough and flexible enough that you can cast lures quite a bit lighter than the lower end of the recommended range.

Although lures as light as the .8 gram Daiwa Presso Vega spoons are not used when fishing streams in Japan, I have found that the Daiwa Wise Stream rods will cast them as far as you would want on a small stream. Heavier lures, though, like the Daiwa Crusader spoons or the Dr. Minnow plugs will cast more easily and with greater accuracy.

The Wise Stream 50TUL (telescopic ultralight) rods share the same 1.5 - 7 gram recommended lure weights as the three piece rods. I have fished both the three piece and the telescopic rods with a range of lures and I think they both cast just fine. Understand that these are well made rods that are nothing at all like the cheapo telescopics that have given that style of rod a bad name. They cast well and fight fish well.

There is both an advantage and a disadvantage to the telescopic Daiwa Wise Stream Rods. The biggest advantage is being able to keep the reel, line and lure attached when the rod is collapsed. It is much quicker to extend the rod than it is to thread the line through the guides and tie on a lure. If you want to fish at several spots along a trail while backpacking, having to completely rig the rod each time may make you pass up spots where you'd make a few casts (and maybe catch a fish or two) if you could just extend the rod and cast.

It's not quite that simple, but almost. The Daiwa Wise Stream telescopic rods have three "floating" guides that slide (allowing you to telescope the rod). When you extend the rod you slide them down (in the direction of the rod butt) until they tighten against the taper of the blank. Once you snug them down, they do stay put.

You have to line them up as you slide them in place, just as you have to line up the fixed guides when you extend the sections. A great tip is to get the sections and the guides lined up perfectly, and then mark them with a line at each joint and at each floating guide using a white or silver permanent marker. Then it will be very easy to again get the perfect alignment each time you extend the rod.

The only disadvantage I see with a telescopic rod is that if you happen to break any section other than the tip section, the whole rod will have to be returned to Daiwa in Japan (at the buyer's expense). With the three piece rods, it is easy to just replace the broken piece. Most people never break a rod, but it is worth knowing.

Please be EXTREMELY careful when removing the rod cap and plastic tubing. If you bend the tubing to the side it is easy to break the rod tip. Please note that I will have checked the rod thoroughly before shipment, and when shipped the rod tip will be intact. Also, given the way the rod is packed, the rod tip cannot be broken in transit.

Daiwa Wise Stream Rods

Personally, I think the designers and engineers achieved their goals with the Daiwa Wise Stream Rods. They are extremely portable compared to two piece rods and they feel good when casting and when playing fish.

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