I recently treated myself to a pair of new fly rods. It has been a long time since I last upgraded, and while the old stuff still works fine, sometimes new is satisfying even if it’s only incrementally better.
Your favorite fly shop is loaded with rods priced from a few hundred bucks to a few grand, and even the kit rods are better than anything I could get my hands on in the 1980s when I started fly fishing. Everything’s better now.
My marginally better new rods have some practical advantages. I changed up the line size a little. I needed something stouter for streamer fishing, which I’ve never seriously pursued. So, one of my new rods is a 6-weight. A 6-weight rod isn’t as trendy as a 7-weight for streamer fishing these days, but I’ll also use it for casting bass poppers. The bass on my local ponds aren’t huge, but the poppers are, and they’re not terribly aerodynamic. Casting them with my 5-weight trout rod is a chore.
My 6-weight will split the difference, and if I end up with a case of streamer fever, I suspect I’ll find a shop willing to sell me a 7-weight. That might be just the thing for carp fishing, as well.
As is my situation with fly rods, I’m well stocked with fly reels. Anglers have long insulted fly reels with the bigotry of low expectations, considering them as nothing more than line-storage devices. Glorified bobbins. While that’s a little bit true, the full story is more complicated.
Let’s start by establishing a baseline: for most freshwater fly fishing, an old-school click-and-pawl reel will be sufficient. If you’re catching panfish, small bass or trout 15 inches and under, you don’t need to play that fish on the reel. Strip them in quickly, pop the hook and get the fish back in the river or pond or ice chest.
If the fish are a little bigger, I do like to get them on the reel as I don’t care for a pile of line at my feet. And if the fish does go on a short run, there’s nothing sweeter than the sound of a click-and-pawl reel giving up line. Keep the drag light and only apply pressure with your off hand on the exposed reel when needed.
Is there a place for high-end reels in freshwater fly fishing? I think there are practical reasons for this. As I said, I like playing fish on the reel, so I appreciate the buttery-smooth drags on modern fly reels, those with low startup inertia. Low startup inertia is a fancy way of saying your reel transitions from static to spinning smoothly, without a glitch that might break off a fish. But most freshwater fly fishers don’t require that level of precision.
What we need is a reel that balances well with the rod. If you drop a grand on a new, wispy piece of feather-light graphite, you need a reel to match. There’s some weird voodoo involved in proper rod-reel balance, but I know imbalance when I feel it. Before I give up on an awkward casting rod, I try it with a lighter or heavier reel. There have been times when I switched reels and the rod was transformed.
Another feature you may want is a spool you can spin to pick up line quickly. I’m not a huge fan of this technique, but I suspect I’m in the minority here.
Finally, there is the flash factor. Like my new rods, I wanted to treat myself to something sexy, and machined billet aluminum, anodized blue and gold in the case of my new reels, clears that bar. They’re pretty, but I suspect neither of those reels will make a major difference when I’m landing a nice fish.
Still, everyone needs a little bling from time to time.