SLP

[FishNoGeek]

Think I'm mostly agreed, Magnus. One relatively trend that I perceive is some further segregation between specialty lines of rods. Leaving DHDs to the side for the moment, and letting the Switch idea die quietly, I'm agreed that ESN has diverged into a separate path.....but I'm more interested in how the saltwater segment is expanding and getting further away from the "trout" rods like the Scott G-Series and the Sage LL reissue. A decade or so ago it was hard to find rods designed specifically for saltwater conditions, but today we're starting to get spoiled for choice. I like it.

I'm also seeing more rods designed for big flies and/or sinking heads - like the Exocett, the Payload, maybe a few others. We played with a bunch of those before a big Amazon trip for peacocks last fall, and I found it to be a very mixed bag. I'm inclined to think that the line taper matters much more than the rod taper anyway, and maybe especially so when you get into that "big fly" neighborhood. I'm not sure that niche will last long. Thoughts?

But in general, as far as I'm concerned, the more the industry embraces the big scary world beyond your father's trout fixation, the better. Can't happen fast enough for me.

[Magnus]

Maybe being a little troutist there? Bear in mind your saltwater sticks are a key part of that effort to sell us more rods - used to be I needed an #8 and a #10. Now I need a #7 for calm days an #8 for wind, a #9 and a #10 for permit and baby tarpon....and on and on.

I have a Loomis Cross Current 10-weight from back in the day, a great rod when it was new. Bloody heavy. Got it for a trip to Mongolia. I took that CC and a 10-weight Helios to Cuba - the Helios was so much lighter it was silly. To the point where I was convinced the Helios would buckle - it didn't. That was early 2009-ish.
The newer generations of Helios rods, good rods, I've measured have not become lighter, fractionally heavier if anything - even if Orvis claim the swing-weigh of subsequent generations is lower. Oh and I measured a high-end Sage recently - the figures are within a baw-hair (translation available) of the Sage flagship rod from 10 years earlier.

For handling those big flies I'd agree the line and leader are far more important. There is an argument for lighter rod and outfit - that's rod and reel - I can make more casts with a lighter better balanced outfit.

On the point about lines, not really a lot going on there either apart from pricing. I find the price of top fly lines hard to swallow. I find it just as hard to believe we fishers buy lines for single handed rods at over £130 or $130 - I don't care how great the taper is...and textured lines suck!

Magnus

[FishNoGeek]

Maybe being a little troutist there?

Just making up for lost time! I was a trout snob with a secret carp addiction for my first few decades, but after fishing the salt regularly for the past 20-ish years....man, it's hard to imagine going back to a mostly trout scene. I still miss the mountains and cold, clear running water, but the fire drill of the flats game is insanely addictive.

Bear in mind your saltwater sticks are a key part of that effort to sell us more rods - used to be I needed an #8 and a #10. Now I need a #7 for calm days an #8 for wind, a #9 and a #10 for permit and baby tarpon....and on and on.

Oh, so true! For awhile I tried to go 6/8/10/12 for my carpy and salty sticks, but I found that I really prefer the 7wt for inshore here on the Gulf Coast...and really liked the 9wt for permit...and I like a 10wt for snook and baby poon...and the 12wt seemed too much for big tarpon, so I found a couple 11s that I really like.....and yeah, here I am: 6/7/8/9/10/11/12. It's shameful, and I'm not proud....but it's been fun, so maybe I am? It's a problem.

For handling those big flies I'd agree the line and leader are far more important. There is an argument for lighter rod and outfit - that's rod and reel - I can make more casts with a lighter better balanced outfit.

For that Amazon trip, we must've run through 30-40 combinations of lines and rods - got some sample lines, borrowed a bunch of rods....it was a whole thing. Good fun. We ended up mostly hating the brick-on-string lines even for the big flies and preferring lighter, longer heads - exactly counter the usual advice for those jungle trips. Thing is, for novice casters, the advice is probably fine: bring heavy heads that can be waterloaded easily and will flip big flies, therefore enabling relatively unsophisticated casters to make 30-40ft shots all day long. Most of those folks aren't carrying 40-60ft with a 12-15cm fly, so they don't want / need a line that can do that. Once again, different strokes....

On the point about lines, not really a lot going on there either apart from pricing. I find the price of top fly lines hard to swallow. I find it just as hard to believe we fishers buy lines for single handed rods at over £130 or $130 - I don't care how great the taper is...and textured lines suck!

I like some - not all - of those fancy schmancy new lines....but I tend to buy them used or grab last season's lines at 70% off on closeout.

Love how textured lines cast. Hate how they sound. And what they do to my fingers. And what I imagine they're doing to my guides. But that's another story....

[Lasse Karlsson]

For that Amazon trip, we must've run through 30-40 combinations of lines and rods - got some sample lines, borrowed a bunch of rods....it was a whole thing. Good fun. We ended up mostly hating the brick-on-string lines even for the big flies and preferring lighter, longer heads - exactly counter the usual advice for those jungle trips. Thing is, for novice casters, the advice is probably fine: bring heavy heads that can be waterloaded easily and will flip big flies, therefore enabling relatively unsophisticated casters to make 30-40ft shots all day long. Most of those folks aren't carrying 40-60ft with a 12-15cm fly, so they don't want / need a line that can do that. Once again, different strokes....

Hi Brian

Interesting take. Most brick on strings are around 30-35 feet head, a few feet of overhang, plus the three feet for hauling and we're looking at a 35-40 feet carry, easy with a 20 cm fly and a flick and its 90-100 feet away. But I am a rather unsophisticated caster.. please elaborate on what that water load loads all the lines I'll be taking to the Maldives in a few weeks are so called bricks on a string. I am a lazy bugger.

Cheers
Lasse

[Mangrove Cuckoo]

I blame the whole "faster is better" thing on the marketing on the graphite's modulus back in the early days. It was the main selling point for quite a while... "Our blanks are made of the XX million modulus graphite fibers!"

Nobody really understood what it meant, but bigger numbers sold newer rods. And the idea of "faster being better" stuck.

I got away from it quite a while ago, and was quite pleased when some manufacturers started to make some of their rods less aggressive. Unfortunately, it seems like that only sells to the more discerning caster, and rods are trending back to fast and light to stay competitive.

[gordonjudd]

I would have added one or two sentences about pointiest and tightest loops to be possible with a broomstick.

Bernd,
Were you able to plot the rod tip path with the broomstick rod? Having little flex I would expect it would have a considerably more rounded tip path than a normal rod.

Yet it still produces tight, pointed loops right from the start. Does that indicate that counter flex has a much bigger effect on the initial loop characteristics (size and shape) than does a straight tip path?

Gordy

[FishNoGeek]

Interesting take. Most brick on strings are around 30-35 feet head, a few feet of overhang, plus the three feet for hauling and we're looking at a 35-40 feet carry, easy with a 20 cm fly and a flick and its 90-100 feet away. But I am a rather unsophisticated caster.. please elaborate on what that water load loads all the lines I'll be taking to the Maldives in a few weeks are so called bricks on a string. I am a lazy bugger.

Lasse,

Hmmm. Well, at the moment I'm imagining two (though there are surely more) primary use cases for brick-on-string lines: one is the novice-in-jungle scenario that I outlined above, where the heavy head enables folks who fish once a year (and never practice casting) to flop 20ish feet of line out behind them, then use that water load and the chunky head to throw 40ish feet (and a big fly) towards the bank with relatively little effort. That last part is important since they need to do it several hundred times in an average day, something many people aren't in shape to do with a 9-10wt rod.

The other use case is where a "rather unsophisticated caster" like yourself (you aren't fooling anyone - that giant blue wall reveals EVERYTHING) can turn a 35-40ft carry into triple digits with a flick in a scenario where your backcast is unobstructed, you're mostly blind casting, there's likely wind in the equation, and distance is very useful. I think those lines make good sense for both of those situations, and probably more?

But the way we approached the Amazon thing was neither of those. We were trying to punch flies as far back into the tangled interface of jungle and river as possible, both poppers and streamers. Most of the time we'd both try to hit roughly the same spot at 60-80ft, usually threading the needle through and around sticks. It was tremendously fun fishing - chugging big poppers on top with a subsurface fly below, calling fish out from deep in the snags - but it required fairly good accuracy and lots of aerial mends. Those brick-on-string lines don't do that kind of fishing very well, I think.

Also, we obviously got hung up on the trees quite regularly. I'm generally of the opinion that even the best among us are going to miss a few if we're really going for those long, penetrating casts, and I wouldn't count myself among that number. As such, using long-belly floating lines made it VASTLY easier to un-hang flies from a distance with rolls and flips. They don't always work, of course, but it's almost impossible to do those fun little tricks with a short, heavy head.

Thoughts?

[Magnus]

"I blame the whole "faster is better" thing on the marketing on the graphite's modulus back in the early days. It was the main selling point for quite a while... "Our blanks are made of the XX million modulus graphite fibers!""

You can blame graphite marketing but that's not how it played out. The first graphite rods I handled were a mix of carbon and glass, that was in the early 70s, blanks came from a couple of sources including a Hardy subsidiary. Famously Hardy could have had a patent on the application of carbon fibre in fishing rods if one of their consultants (Richard Walker) had written up the patent spec properly, he specified a certain proportion of carbon and gave away many many millions in royalties.

The main selling point was that rods with carbon and later all-carbon rods were lighter. For the first couple of decades rod designers were basing their designs on old patterns, the rods they made were like cane and like glass - they were sold that way. Carbon or graphite only really came into its own about the late 80s. It took another 10 to 20 years for materials to come available to make significantly lighter faster rods - then there was a marketing driven push that way. Blame isn't really the right way to frame this, the sales people found we consumers responded to and wanted lighter and stiffer rods. I think it was really lighter which sold those rods to us, oh and 4 sections - we LOVE four piece rods. Incidentally Jim Murphy owned Redington during this period and really pushed the lifetime guarantee - that sold far more rods that stiffness - virtually every brand had to respond and more than 20 years later they are still trying to put limits on the unlimited liability that let loose.

I've had debates on the Board about comparing rod brands and to be frank it never achieved much. My 2 cents. There are brands which go another way, for example I have had and like Winston and Scott rods which are not stiff compared with Sage or modern Hardy - but then Sage and Hardy also make rods with lower stiffness and slightly deeper actions. My first 'class' rod was a Loomis from the late 80s I think, still got it, that was comparatively stiff back in the day, not outrageous, and fairly light. Now that rod is slow, a little heavy and just shows its age. - still fishes well enough. My newer rods the same length and line class are literally half the weight, crisper and stiffer.

Magnus

[Magnus]

"bring heavy heads that can be waterloaded easily and will flip big flies"

"flop 20ish feet of line out behind them, then use that water load and the chunky head to throw 40ish feet (and a big fly) towards the bank with relatively little effort."

Nope, horrible. I like an occasional brick on a string - but that's not why. I have an issue testing rods, so many lines are out of spec I've had to resort to weights and measures So rods can find me throwing a '7-weight in name only' - because that represents a line people buy and use. Can make for easy and relaxed casting of course.

Magnus

[Phil Blackmar]

I would think the bricks on a string could be useful training aids for beginning casters. I am not a fly casting teacher, but in golf when I was working at golf schools with Hall of Fame instructor Jim Flick, one of the first things we tried to do was to get the students to feel the club head. Controlling the path of the club thru impact should be an intent not a result and to do this you need to feel the club head. The easiest example of this comes from there are 13 full swing clubs in a bag, all of different lengths and lofts which predicate different ball positions, weight distributions and attack angles. Thought to make the same swing on all.

A friend of mine was a troutie. He was beginning to get into saltwater fly fishing but his casts were not good enough I loaned him my 12 wt to encourage him to feel the weight of the line and it worked nicely. Today he is a pretty darn good caster.