This has turned into an interesting discussion and I have missed most of it. Calling any line manufacturer on the phone will result in nothing but frustration. Even emailing them may take several tries to get the correct information.
I went through this with both SA and Cortland via emails but did wind up with the TOTAL HEAD WEIGHT of the series of lines I was after from both of them, I think.
They will first give you the 30' weight which is totally irrelavent except for 30 foot heads.
I finally got to a guy at Cortland named Joe Goodspeed who actually went down and cut the heads off a bunch of lines, weighed them and sent me the results. I bought one of those lines and will probably buy more as time goes on. The head lengths are nice on the lighter lines.
I think I put those weights up somewhere on this forum. They were the tarpon taper series from SA and the Cortland Liquid Crystal floating series. The new generation Cortland that has exibited none of the memory or tangling problems as the first generation allegedly did.
Everyone has to start writing tech at these companies pestering them for grain weights of the entire head, not the useless first 30 feet they insist on giving us. If everyone did that, sooner or later they would get sick of it and start publishing useful information or at least adding useful information to the useless.
Spug said:
That's why I made the comment about Rio having the "full head weight" listed on their site.
The “head weights” Rio has published on the entire Tarpon series of lines are all incorrect on their website. They are the first 30’ weights they are calling “head weights” on their website on the tarpon taper series page. The actual head weight on their 12 wt tarpon line is over 100 grains more than they have published. I don’t know about the other series of lines, but I would not take them at their word without checking further.
kwb said:
Actual weight will not matter so much as the taper will, meaning one line with 33' of line out of the guides will cast heavier than say another taper at 33' even if they weighed the same.
You’re going to have to explain that one to me. I don’t know what you mean by “cast heavier”. A short stubby head will feel clunky compared to a long taper and will land heavier on the water. However, the load on the rod for the same weight out the tip will be very nearly identical. What does change is how much load each rod and each angler can handle. But once that's known, then all that's needed for that angler to buy another line for that rod is the total head weight. The taper affects all kinds of things as far as presentation, shooting, turnover and so on, but weight out the rod tip is going to make the rod behave the same way regardless of the taper.
I did a test last winter where I cast a 12 wt Rio tarpon taper WFF with my old 12 wt Sage RPLX a number of times and marked where I was holding the line prior the the final shoot. The I did the same with a Rio Leviathan WFF. The Rio 12 wt Tarpon taper head with leader weighs 566 grains and to where I was holding the line the total was 690 grains.
The Leviathan head with leader weighs 595 gr. and to where I was holding the running line weighed 709 grains. That is less than a 3% difference in weight to get the same feel, even though the tarpon taper was 10 feet longer and a completely different profile. My object when selecting a line weight is to get one that does not mush out the rod before it mushes out my wrist. Incidently, and surprisingly to me, the overhang out the tip was very close to half the head length on both lines.
I cast both an Xi3 and a Hardy Pro axis with that Rio 12 wt, and neither of them handled that heavy a line the way I like to cast, so I got these figures from Cortland and Sci Anglers. I can only verify the Cortland ones since Joe Goodspeed from Cortland knew exactly what I was after and even labeled the line weights "@ 47’ " for the 47’ head and “@ 42’” for the 42 foot head.
The Sci. Anglers email gave no detail in their email confirming that this was the total head weight I asked for, so they are still suspect and I wouldn’t count on their accuracy. They could well be 30’ weights for all I know. I don’t have any SA lines in that series to weigh for confirmation, and they do not publish any weights at all that I could find in the tarpon series.
Here are the total head weights in those lines which I think I put up on this board somewhere before.
Cortland Liquid Crystal
6-9wt - longer head profile
6wt - 250gn @ 47'
7wt - 275gn @ 47'
8wt - 305gn @ 47'
9wt - 345gn @ 47'
10-12wt compact head design (Cortland Liquid Crystal)
10wt - 350gn @ 42'
11wt - 400gn @ 42'
12wt - 455gn @ 42'
Sci. Anglers Tarpon Taper WFF
Tarpon WF 10: 350 grains
Tarpon WF 11: 385 grains
Tarpon WF 12: 425 grains
Tarpon WF 13: 530 grains
