guys, i've been watching those japanese videos where they cast poppers from the boat to Trevally's and some other fish.
what blank do i use to make me one of those rods?

thank you.

Not sure, but a Hot Shot blank might work very well for that. Light tip but extremely powerful mid and butt sections.

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Hi Ridge,
This type of popper fishing has drawn quite a circle of followers fishing for yellowfin tuna, bluefin tuna and giant trevally. The type of blank used for this style of fishing would depend on the size of fish you are expecting to encounter and the weight of the lures you would expect to be casting. These rods would definately fit in to a specialist design bracket, and in the heavier end these rods are extremely powerful to handle very high drag settings often using lines of over 100lbs breaking strain. Many of the rod manufacturers for these rods do not sell blanks, but in the US there are the OTI rods, and Ocean Revolution rods who supply blanks, and overseas there is also Seed, and Xzoga who sell blanks. Some of the popular rod blank manufacturers have blanks that are suitable such as the Calstar GF700H rated at 30-80lbs, GF700XH rated at 40-100lbs and GF800H. Generally speakig these rods are between 7' to 8'6" in lentgh.
These rods are often rated for their power using the lure weight, and a PE rating which refers to the thickness of line to be used. The higher the PE number, the thicker the line and therefore the stronger the line. The PE is a Japanes(from the silk industry) unit that refers to the diameter of the line. As a rule of thumb, 1PE unit relates to 10lbs of breaking strain, so a PE6 would relate to 60lbs breaking strain.

I addressed the Ulua plugging rods in the thread titled "spinning rod blank for tarpon"

The Lamiglas NZ102 2XXH was designed for this purpose.

Don

Don Becker