Today’s angler has numerous fishing rods to select from to fish with.  Salt or inshore anglers may require extremely heavy equipment for landing huge fish.  While freshwater anglers’ desirer lightweight and sensitive fishing rods with the ability to cast finesse lures accurately or long distances; along with fishing poles with enough strength to easily handle fishing in heaver cover.

The majority of fishing rod blanks can be broken down into 3 categories: graphite, fiberglass, and graphite-fiberglass blend.  Every fishing rod blank has a handle.  These handles are constructed form several materials with cork and EVA being the 2 most popular.  Handle styles typically depend on what species of fish and specific technique is being used.

In the past, anglers had limited options for rod handles, but this recently has all changed.  Large numbers of professional and weekend tournament anglers have split from using the traditional style handle to a split grip.  A split grip eliminates some of the handle, exposing more of the rod blank for increased hand contact.  The obvious result becomes increased sensitivity of lures and fish strikes.

The majority of fishing rod manufactures have become aware of this trend towards split grip handles.  While no single manufacturer can claim discovering the split grip handle; however, its trend in the market place can easily be notice.  Numerous rod manufactures have developed a series or line of split grip rods.

Another advantage for anglers is most manufactures offer split griped rods designed for a specific style of fishing such as, dropshot, soft plastic, jerkbait, topwater, jig, worm crankin’ just to name a few.  In addition, these rods are usually made from high quality materials like IM-10 Multimodulus graphite blanks or other highly sensitive materials.

Anglers may always be split over deciding which handle is best for their fishing needs.  Now they can choose from the more traditional style or the new split grip that’s all the rage among professional anglers.