On Sun, 23 Nov 2003 17:10:08 +0000, Lazarus Cooke
wrote:

In article , Lazarus
Cooke wrote:

I've always spey cast, some of the time. This whole business of special
rods for spey casting is quite recent. Are they really any better for
spey casting, or is just a gimmick?

Lazarus

Sorry I didn't explain well enough. I didn't say I didn't know what a
spey cast is, or where it comes from. I know the Spey well ** indeed,
if you want to learn about the early Spey flies you could do worse
than to look at a book by a distant relative, "Autumns on the Spey".

I live in Britain, where people have always used the long rod for
salmon. So I have always used a fifteen rod for salmon fishing. (or
most of the time. On some west country rivers I'll use a nine foot
trout rod, which works very well, but for the bigger, rocky rivers in
Scotland or Ireland I'll generally use a fifteen or twelve foot rod, as
much to control the line in the water as for length of casting.)

So, depending on the direction of the wind, the state of the bank and
so on, I'll sometimes cast overhand, sometimes spey. I was taught to
spey cast at the same time as I learnt to cast overhand.

Recently, though, (viz., in the past ten years or so), I've seen rods
marketed in two fifteen foot versions, one normal, one so-called "spey"
rods. The distinction seems daft to me.

Lazarus


Penny dropped. You're wondering why North Americans refer to "spey"
rods when you would call it a "salmon" rod. Correct? It's just the
name that's caught on over here, the rods are the same. There's
always been a terminology problem over here as "two-hander" is too big
a mouthful and "salmon" is pretty useless when we use them for chasing
steelhead.

There also basically two classes of two-handed rods which Sage has a
addressed with it's "Euro" and "Traditional" models but these names
haven't widely caught on. Despite these attempts, we tend to call any
long fly rod with a two-handed grip a "spey" rod.

As I mentioned earlier, the two classes of rods are based on shooting
head vs. long line. In the UK, shooting head rods aren't that common
yet so I'm not surprised that you find the distinction useless. Spend
some time doing the Skagit or underhand casts with different rods and
you might have a different appreciation. I spent a couple of days
recently casting rods using short belly and medium belly lines as part
of a group contributing to a magazine article on "spey" rods. We
performed both Skagit and Spey casts with each rod, using both lines.
There was an amazing difference in some rods when we switched from
short to medium bellied lines. There is only 10' difference in the
head so you'd think the difference would be negligible, but no, some
rods were useless with the short heads and others were useless with
the long ones. There were six of us casting and we were unanimous in
our opinions about this. There's no doubt in my mind that some rods
work well with DTs and traditional spey casting while others work much
better with the short heads.

We were also affected by the lack of a standardized rating system for
lines and rods. None of us liked the new fast Hardy's on the short
lines but loved them on the long. In retrospect, they weren't getting
loaded on the short lines and we should have gone up a line weight.

I think we'll see the so-called spey-action rods disappear from the
market as the faster rods take over. I own a Lamiglas that was made
to Mike Maxwell's "true spey rod" standards and it handles a DT very
nicely. It will cast shooting heads but it isn't pleasant or
efficient. The newer, faster rods seemed to do both jobs well so
there doesn't seem to be a reason for maintaining a distinction.
Given that Hardy has introduced two fast action cannons, the days of
the slow rod have to be numbered. One of the Loomis reps in the group
normally fishes with a GLX but on casting the Hardy Gem, he fell in
love and said that were it not for his Loomis affiliation, he would
toss his GLX for the Gem.

Give it a few years Lazarus and, except for some UK diehards, we'll be
back to only one type of rod.



Peter

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