Sandy Nelson tells why he loves to fish glass rods.
Why is Glass Epic?
This is a question I get asked regularly and it’s not the easiest one to answer.
Like many people of my generation and the one before, we started fly fishing as kids with glass rods and I remember them being perfectly usable. However, with the advent of graphite we nearly all abandoned glass for this wondrous new material and our old rods were left to gather dust in the corner. But while graphite/carbon rods evolved so too has fibreglass and in some cases it's a very different material to that from which our old rods were built, as I was to discover.
If I'm honest my first foray into modern glass was not very inspiring as the rods I tried had softer actions that seemed to live up to the perceived noodle stereotype, had an uncomfortable amount of bounce in the tip and were not the practical fishing tools of my memories. These rods do have an enthusiastic following, similar to the guys who love the softer cane rods, but I found them quite inaccessible coming from a modern medium fast action carbon rod background. Horses for courses as always, but it did discourage me from exploring the material in any greater depth.
This all changed when I had the chance to build an Epic Fast Glass rod from Carl McNeil. Here was a rod that I could really identify with and it had me hooked. Why? To begin with I was not altogether sure, my idea was for a novelty item that I could bring out now and again like I do with my cane rod, but the more I fished with it and the more I became attuned to its super smooth action, the more I kept going back for more. It is now my go-to rod for much of my river fishing.
As a dry fly addict I spend a lot of time on the river and quite often have to perform a wide variety of presentation casts in order to avoid drag.
The smoother action of glass and having a little bit more mass in the sections helps me to perform these slack line casts with increased ease. Keeping the lengths at 7ft6” and 8ft means the swing weight of the rod is akin to a modern 9ft carbon rod and in many cases better, so its very easy to transition from one to the other.
The natural loading action of the rod with just a tapered leader out of the tip, makes short range fishing very easy, so you can present a fly almost at your feet. Equally, if necessary you can wind the rod up to shoot a fly out 70-80ft (even with the 7ft 6” rods). This wide range of ability adds extra dimensions to your fishing especially when on weedy or tight streams. The inbuilt loading feature of the glass blank is what I believe helps with those tricky “casts that catch fish” and certainly provides that effortless sensation.
Personally, I can achieve about 80% of those casts with my carbon rods, but it requires more concentration and greater intent. Glass seems to give me a helping hand, making them undemanding and expanding my ability to encompass pretty much everything I want the line to do.
The bend you get in a glass rod is much deeper and the tip is stiffer than most modern carbon rods, this means more of the rod takes much of the load both during casting and when playing fish, protecting light tippets and allowing you to land fish quicker. The lack of tip bounce in the Epic is one of the main reasons they feel more familiar to someone used to carbon rods. Some Kabuto rods provide a similar feel but have a character all of their own and that’s a whole other story.
It’s a cliché to say the rod becomes an extension of your arm, but to say Epic glass makes the line do what you are thinking, is not far off the mark.
If you are a trout bum, fish a lot and often find yourself fishing in rugged environments, then glass is far more resilient than carbon and much less expensive than cane. You can have far more confidence when crawling through the undergrowth or over boulder strewn banks and you can even wave it about in a thunderstorm!
Although capable of withstanding being stood on, with the exciting colours they are easy to find on the bank, so you should never find yourself testing this out. For those more concerned with being subtle, the blanks also come in translucent brown, olive and natural glass, although I have noticed no difference in their ability to fool fish. They can even take the impact damage from bead head flies without suffering the stress fractures that often lead to carbon rod failures at important moments.
The S2 glass rods coming in a variety of brighter colours adds a fun element to the product and can take you right back to the bright red, orange, yellow and green rods many of us started our obsession with. Back to the wonderful days of exploration before life got all too serious. I for one, fish to escape and immerse myself in my all consuming passion just so I can see those beautiful brown trout. Using my salsa 580 not only extends my casting repertoire to its fullest potential but takes me back to being 10 years old when the fingers and thumbs of tying on my own creations occasionally resulted in lively golden treasure.
The years have added patience to the mix and an ever decreasing selection of flies, but that same feeling is always there and the Epic glass rod seems to amplify not only the physical enjoyment of presenting a fly, drag free, to a willing fish, but also the excitement of the 10 year old me.
It might sound like romantic nonsense but is that not what fishing is all about?