Switch Rods

[BBBrownie]

When I was at Alaska West there was a Finnish guy doing just that with a 14' rod. He'd use a single spey to get the line straight out in front of him then pick it up and overhead it to the other bank on a run called pipeline since there was tons of backcast room. Unfortunately he managed to cast a little too far once and snagged his fly on some brush as seen in the pic...

 

Too funny! When I first started with a spey rod I tried to get the general idea behind a couple casts then headed to the Thompson with it. I had been fishing steelhead singlehand prior to that, but the thought of singlehand swinging on the Thompson intimidated me for obvious reasons...I got to the river, started making what were at the time terrible snap T's, wasn't working great, so I figured out that I could use a spey cast to get the line straight out in front of me, then pick up line and bomb 'er over my head. That was working great, getting 100 feet easily, until end of the third day, I was deep into a backcast, and perhaps over applied the power a bit on the forward stroke and my Zaxis 8129 made a thundering "CRRRAACCCKKK" and snapped off right above the cork...mind blowing. not sure if there was an unknown nick on the blank or something, but after that I vowed to learn a proper spey cast and never looked back.

[jdangler]

I plan on casting the 5119 both ways, depending which way I want to fish, nymphing or swinging a streamer, location, I just think it opens up so many options thru a day.

[Whistler]

Ok I am obviously biased but if your in the market for a switch I would be sure to check out the Loop opti switch and 10'7" #6 and my trout rod of choice the new Pieroway Metal Detector 10'5" 400grain which is by far the lightest 6 weight switch on the market.

 

Many switch rods on the market today are too long to be much use for single hand casting. Switch rods are essentially compromise rods and many may excell at one discipiline(ie spey) but come up short at another(ie single hand). It is a challenging thing to design a rod that casts single hand overhead,spey casts, two hand overheads and single hand spey casts equally well. Many switch rods require different lines to perform well depending how they are being cast.

 

What makes the 10'5" Pieroway so special is that, when paired with the Rio AFS outbound 400 it was designed for, it does everything equally well with one line.