The Drift: Are We Asking Too Much From Fly Rods?

I’ve been in charge of bedtime for my 8-month-old daughter lately, which means I’ve picked out some new stories to read while rocking her to sleep. Somehow—and I’m sure this will shock you—we’ve ended up reading John Gierach. We’re currently halfway through Trout Bum, and I plan to read every book to her before she’s old enough to ask for princess stories instead.

Of the many things that stand out to me when re-reading Gierach, his love affair with bamboo has been striking this go-round. He fished the blue-collar rods, the ones he could afford (and, in the case of Mike Clark’s rods, the ones he really couldn’t, but bought anyway). John was the first to tell you he wasn’t some expert angler, but he fished more often than most of us, so he certainly had a grasp on the performance he wanted in a fly rod.

When he didn’t use bamboo, I know in his later years he used an old Orvis Helios 2, because that’s the rod he rigged up while we fished a small creek together in Utah one spring. The Helios 2 was a fine rod, but by today’s standards? I’m not sure how many folks would view it.

Which got me thinking: are we asking too much of our fly rods these days? Anglers like Gierach, Koke Winters, AK Best, Ed Engle, Curt Gowdy, Lee Wulff, Gary LaFontaine, Vince Marinaro, and many of the other great writers of the sport never really bragged about their gear too much. Sure, they all likely used nice tackle, but by today’s standards, we’d probably laugh at a lot of their rods.

Then, you watch a video like the one below, where Wulff and Gowdy are catching 5-7 pound brook trout on bamboo rods, and wonder how much the rod actually matters.

Just last week, I received a new rod to review from a company who’s made some of the industry’s favorite sticks. I haven’t had it on the water yet, but I spent a half-hour casting with it on the lawn. My takeaway was that this rod felt an awful lot like the one it’s replacing—so why bother with something new in the first place?

Well, part of that is the insatiable demand for new and exciting. When a fly rod company discontinued a rod series that I personally think is the best they’ve ever built, a friend who works there told me, “It’s the end of the rod’s life cycle. It’s almost eight years old. We have to come out with something new.”

In their case, they had a new graphite and resin to work with, so there was technically something new, even if the differences were too minute for most anglers to appreciate.

Now, with some companies claiming a percentage increase in accuracy with their rod, or a return to old-school feeling with this rod, or the “lightest rod ever made,” it’s enough to make even a gear-junkie like me wonder if this is all getting out of hand. Fly rods are just tools, and at some point, won’t we reach a certain level of performance that just can’t be improved upon?

Some might argue we’re already there, and they may have a point. The differences between top-tier rods largely come down to the action you prefer, and whatever marketing copy speaks to your angling instincts the strongest. At that level, you’re buying feeling and brand more so than performance. A rod at the same price, from a different company, will put your hopper next to the bank just as effectively.

For the new anglers getting into the sport, the price disparity can create an expectation that top-end rods do almost everything for you. After all, shouldn’t a rod that costs as much as a mortgage payment make your casts laser-accurate, and hold your drink while doing so?

Maybe that’s what fly rods are missing. A drink holder is their intuitive leap forward in design.

Or, perhaps, fly rod design peaked years ago. We expect the latest and greatest rods to blow us away, but they’re just retreading ground we saw thirty years ago. Are our expectations out of whack, or are we just excited about new ways to spend money doing what we’ve always done: blowing off something more important so we can go fishing instead?