Understand, czando is refereeing to fishing the Delaware River and its West and East Branches. This is broad technical water akin to the Henry's Fork or, even more so, the Missouri River around Craig. Often, one can not wade to where the fish are and, if fishing from a drift boat, getting close enough to use a Circa spooks the big heads. So, we are not talking about average trout rivers but ones with specialized presentation requirements and it is these circumstances that challenge fly rod performance and fly rod designers.
It was these types of environments that Harry Wilson was thinking about when he introduced revolutionary Scott Graphite in the late 1970's and what Orvis strode for in the early 1980's with the Western Series. New Sage hit the nail with RPL but really Steve Rajeff invented the modern fly rod with genuine acumen for this fishing with GLX. Scott STS, Sage XP and especially Redington Nti "Nano" pushed the envelop further but this is when some fly fishers started feeling, "whoa these rods are just too fast". Of course, many of us adapted to the faster rods and learned the substantial advantages they offered in technical presentation and therefore loved them.
These rods culminated with NRX and ONE and then something happened. Constantly experimenting rod designers with aerospace/military material technology advancements devised methodologies to combine some of the old, sweet deeper flexing fly rod feel and timing with fast rod type recovery rates and lower taper power reserves...kind of the best of all worlds. This has a lot to do with low mass construction that preserves power and durability combined with inspired design.
Getting new X for me was not a leap of faith; my Sage expert friend and I have been going back and forth about Sage rods since 1986 and understand one another really well...when Sage came up with ONE, I got one of the first ones built and with X, the second one made. There were none available to "test" so I tested. I was an early adopter of NRX too and between Sage and G.Loomis I sport a hot quiver. Does this meant I have less interest in what Scott (a maker whose rods I have been fishing n since the 70's on the Fork and everywhere else) or T&T, my first rod from them was a 1972 Hendrickson cane 7 1/2'/#5, or Hardy whose Zenith/Poraxis rods I have been a fan of since their introduction? No. And now Douglas SKY is on my list and I look forward to casting a Stickman and like Gary Loomis's EDGE and am open minded to any new creative fly rod...brand means very little to me.
So much for hardware, now an illustrative story. Dillon and I where on one of the famous Missouri headwater rivers a little ways below its dam. This is slick technical water and a bit deep so we were using the Clacka Craft with Dillon on the sticks. A heavy overhanging entanglement of willow and alder trees shaded a bank with several large rooks forming current seam feeding lanes and PMDs were emerging well. We were limited as to where we could anchor to get a drift but there is a spot about 50' above this bank whose character stretched downstream for another 50 - 75 feel or so. My turn and I'm fishing ONE#5 with an FWX 7/8 loaded with SA MEDT with an Orvis Braded Butt Medium built out to about 17' in total length and have a thorax PMD Trillen knotted to 5' of 5X. The currents twisted and eddied among the rocks protected and shaded by the overhanging limbs. But fish, big fish where sipping in their protected lies. I lengthened some line away from the trout and with the high line speed loop smoothly extending I generated some horizontal amplitudes into it and the leader by moving ONE's super, scalpel like tip side to side and aiming 5' above the top fish some 50' away. Dropping the line from a high release point, fly coming down first with an upstream reach cast followed by a big L mend, I had enough time and on water slack to adjust the flies attitude so not a curl of tippet was below it, fly fist is my motto. But it drifted a few inches outside the top trout who ignored it as he sucked in a natural. But there was no lifting that line off the water to try again because there was an even bigger brown below that rainbow. I had carefully stripped a lot of line into the carpeted area of the boat in anticipation of potential distance needs and fed several feet of line into the drift by rolling the tip of the rod while mending slack into the drift. And then more line. With calculated reading of the currents and with water doing what it likes to do, flowing downstream, by the end I looped even more mends into the dead drift and then had just colored string in my hand as the last fish on that bank tipped up and ate the fly! Feeling the hook, he burst from the shadows into the sunlight with a thrashing leap throwing spray from his deep, butter colored, dark spotted flanks then ran and leapt again as is his name, Salmo, leaper to the sun. What a fish and what a drift. I'd post an image of him here except for one little detail, I did not bring him to net, the hook pulled free. Well, I did have a lot of line out into the pulling currents...
Decades of practiced technique and responsiveness to ever varying habitats aside, a rod with super sensitive, instantly recovering, sharp reflexes with ample supportive potency in each section of the taper is an invaluable asset to control extra long presentations. Of course, skillful fly fishers have been making adroit presentations with slack feeding into the drift forever with earlier less precise fly rods...it is the angler, not the tool and always has been...but todays Flagship rods not merely enhance but exponentially add to the enjoyment of executing these techniques. This is why I add at least one new dry fly specialty rod almost every season, I really can't help myself.
