Free Troutsmith by Kevin Searock Page B

youthful exuberance damaged the end of the down-locking reel seat: I had tried to hurdle a guardrail at the top of a steep bank while hiking back to the car after fishing Pennsylvania’s Beltzville Reservoir. This episode destroyed the butt cap, but I jury-rigged a replacement with some kind of plastic weather stripping cut to size and crudely hammered into place where the butt cap used to be. Amazingly, this battered old fly rod still casts a mean line today and I can catch fish with it. But there was a time when my old rod was factory fresh and gleaming.
    In my journal there’s a picture of me holding the first good fish I caught with the rod: a twenty-one-inch walleye from below Rough River Dam near Leitchfield, Kentucky. The fish struck a #8 Woolly Worm fished deep at the end of a 3x leader and is still the only walleye I’ve ever caught on a fly. The picture was taken in March 1975, and I’d had the fly rod and reel for less than three months. They looked stunning. All the guides were intact. The light green fiberglass blank contrasted nicely with the dark green wraps, the decals were fresh, the cork of the grip was pale and new, and the green-anodized reel seat glittered in the sunlight. Where could I find my old rod in new or near-new condition?
    The answer, like the answers to so many questions, was on my desktop. Simple searches on eBay turned up lightly used examples of my green Garcia fly rod every couple of weeks. The same was true of the Heddon 310 reel. This tackle was inexpensive when it was new, and I probably paid as much for the rod and reel on eBay in 2008 as my dad did at SportMart in 1974, except that a dollar went a lot further in 1974.
    It felt like Christmas when the long cardboard tube arrived in the mail. I carefully unpacked my “new” old green fly rod, mounted the reel on it, and laid it out next to the “old” old green fly rod. The differences were so stark that a casual observer might not have believed that they were the same make and model. All the guides and fittings on the new old rod were intact, including the little wire keeper ring above the winding check. Decals, only slightly deteriorated, identified the rod as a model “#8237-A, 8′, DRY FLY ACTION, AFTMA #6 & 7,” details I once knew by heart but had forgotten over the years.
    In the mid-1970s such fly rods were considered versatile, all-around fly rods for most freshwater fishing. The 5-weight fly rods were light trout rods; 3- and 4-weight rods were just starting to become popular. The majority of trout specialists that I knew used 7½-foot fiberglass or split cane fly rods that carried 5-weight lines for most of their fishing. Longer rods, whether glass or bamboo, weren’t very popular then because they were relatively heavy. The introduction of light-weight graphite (carbon fiber) rods completely altered the fishing landscape, and now long rods are back in vogue. The first production graphite fly rods came onto the market in 1973; the Fenwick HMG series. I bought one in 1990 and loved it, but in 1975 such a rod was out of my very limited economic reach.
    Cortland 333 fly lines are still on the market today, so it was a simple matter to buy a reasonable facsimile of my 1975 fly line. Like all successful tackle makers, Cortland has continually improved this entry-level fly line. But one thing has stayed the same over the years: the 333 was, and is, a fantastic value. It casts better and lasts longer than many so-called premium fly lines.
    â€œDRY FLY ACTION” gave me a good laugh when I took my new old fly rod out to the side yard for a bit of casting practice. What was a good, stiff, fast-action rod in 1975 was a snail-slow, floppy action compared to today’s graphite rods. At first I didn’t think I would be able to fish with such a noodle, but once I slowed down my casting stroke it wasn’t so bad. Indeed, I could see a definite advantage to the super-soft rod if