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

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