I bought the liplees crank model last week. I bought it to throw squarebills. thought it had a soft enough action to keep fish buttoned. Well at Fork last weekend I lost 6 fish in a row on and RC 1.5. One of them was a pig! 8lbs plus. On all the fish, the hooks would just pull out. They weren't throwing em' in the air. What ya'll think? Wrong rod for the application? Thought I was better at fightin' fish than this.

You have a choice to make really. Buy the less expensive H2O bait and replace the hooks with "sharper/sticky" hooks or buy a more expensive bait with "sharper" hooks. Sometimes even the more expensive baits don't have hooks that penetrate "continuously" as you and the fish put pressure on them.

KVD even changes the hooks on the Strike King baits which are more expensive then the H2O baits.

I once watched Rick Clunn sit in his boat and sharpen hooks on a multitude of crankbaits one evening. His point was the hooks need to first "stick" to the fishes mouth; then penetrate as pressure is applied and continue to penetrate past the barb.

You obviously had the correct bait and correct presentation for the conditions. You just need to decide if the hooks on the bait are satisfactory.

Good Luck!
John

Are you suggesting that the rod is the reason you lost the fish??? I highly doubt that. I have used a 7' Heavy for cranks before because my cranking rod broke while on the water. I didn't lose any more fish because of the rod. You just have to make sure not to horse the fish around when your throwing a crankbait. And no matter how careful you are there are gonna be days where you lose alot of fish.

Thats exactly what I am saying...wait...I was using an 17$ crankbait. I hope it has decent enough hooks to hold on to at least 3 of the 6 bites I got. I too have broken my favorite crankbait rod that had proven itself to me, and continued to catch fish on a heavier action rod after. Horsing the fish wasn't the problem. These fish mostly came off at the boat after the fight was damn near over. On their last run really. I'm stumped really. The particular bait I was using has caught a lot of fish for me. I have a hard time believing it was the bait. I throw Crankbaits a lot, and really don't lose that many fish. I actually changed rods after the 6th fish, and had no problems after that, but the time of day dictated a change in bait colors. So many variables really.....Should I s*#@^%n the rod?

No 2 rods fish the same. You are probably more suited to the other rods you throw so you have a power setting for when they take the bait you know how much pressure to apply for the hookset. Try tinkering around with how you set the hook and see if that doesn't help.

different lures different hooksets