Small Streams and the Rods that Make Them so Enjoyable
8 Foot 4 Weight 2 Piece Moderate Action
2 piece, 4 weight: enough to handle a nice brown but light enough to appreciate the fight of an average brook trout, moderate action, 8 foot. Your small stream might perform best with a shorter and lighter rod; some small stream fly rods are as short as 4' 6" for extreme bushwacking. But who says you can only have one small stream fly rod? While technology is delivering ultra-fast fly rods, small stream fly rods are usually moderate to slow. It throws nymphs and dry flies very well, and even handles small streamers. It is short enough to avoid brush but long enough to roll cast. It is perfect for the small streams of Apalachia and New England.
Cherry Burl Grip for Maximum Sensitivity
On the small stream finesse is king, and the sensitivity of a wood grip delivers max performance when detecting a subtle strike or feeling the rod load up to deliver a precision cast into the strike zone. Wood transmits vibrations and torque to your hand without the damping effect of cork. The traditionalist will enjoy a cork grip, but to squeeze mean performance from the rod blank, wood is the ultimate. Whether you choose graphite or bamboo, the wood grip is unparalleled in small stream performance.
Stainless Two Ring Reel Seat
Stainless rings securely hold the reel in place on the cherry burl seat. The wood is sealed with Cyanoacrylate for tough, completely sealed durability. You should always rinse your equipment off after using it, but with the stainless steel rings, fully sealed reel seat and spar varnished grip this outfit is impervious to the elements.
A Work of Art
Cosmetics have nothing to do with the fishing performance of a rig, but a quality fly rod is a work of art. Most guys who enjoy small stream fly fishing also enjoy fishing with a work of art. While a fly rod cannot come close to matching the beauty of a wild trout, making it a work of art can be a token tribute to the species we pursue. The feather inlays are from a jungle cock, but many different pheasant and other feathers look tasteful as well. Even though the current supply of jungle cock feathers comes from farmed birds they are still some of the most striking decorative feathers available to rodbuilders and fly tiers.
My Interest in Small Streams
Explaining why you like a particular type of fishing is like explaining why Riesling is better than chardonnay. It is an individual thing and is probably different for everyone.
My very first experience on small streams came when I was a young boy. My father and I took some red worms and he showed me a boarded up one-room schoolhouse that he had attended as a child. Behind it was a tiny brook that he could have jumped across. He drifted one of those worms down through the rocks and reeled back a small rainbow trout. It was the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. From that moment I was hooked. This was different from sitting on a bank with constant reminders to keep my eye on the bobber. This was active fishing, it was a lot like hiking, fishing, and hunting all rolled into one, and from that day on I lived for those days when we got up early and drove into the hills in search of often unnamed streams that held brook trout. I loved to go fishing, but no other kind of fishing could compare to small stream trout fishing.
We heated with wood, and my dad taught school. Once I got to be a teenager and could run a chainsaw, our summers were spent cutting and stacking wood. As soon as we had enough for the winter, we traded the saws for fishing rods. We would spend hours pouring over topo maps to find feeder streams to waters that were usually stocked by the fish commission. If there were any fish in these tiny feeders they were native brook trout and that is what we looked for.
One small stream we regularly fished was one that my Grandfather had fished as a young man; it still held trout, and we somehow managed to get permission to fish it. It was there that I landed my first brookie. Several summers later the land was sold and posted. We tried to fish streams that my dad had fished years before, but found one had been polluted by mining runoff, and another had shrunken into nothing more than a drainage ditch. Those summers were great. We saw all kinds of wildlife, ate lunches of Pepsi and candy bars, logged lots of miles on dirt roads, and even wandered into quicksand one time.
The best stream we ever discovered ran under a tiny bridge on a main highway and was so choked with brush that it wasn't visible from the road. We found it on a topo map and turned on a logging road that ran up the hill not far from the water. It was tiny but ran year around. We hiked upstream and every hole and riffle had a small, brightly colored brook trout. It was fishing like you dream about. And then we came to the hole. It was the perfect lair for a trout. We knew it held the biggest fish in the stream. It had an undercut bank so deep that tree roots had grown outward and nearly formed a bridge to the opposite bank. I can only guess, but the hole was at least three feet deep. Funny thing about that hole, no matter how many times we drifted it, we never got a single bite. In a stream that had a trout behind every rock, there was no trout in the perfect hole.
That hole was about a quarter mile from the main stem and a few feet downstream I caught my first brown trout. He rolled out from under a bunch of roots. Right after that the stream ran into the DOT right of way and became so brushy that it was unfishable.
My dad was a part-time reporter and one of his editors was a legend in my eyes. He was a small stream fisherman who specialized in going up tiny water and emerging with enormous brown trout. He wouldn't tell anyone how he did it, but years later I learned that he did a lot of fishing at night. I told him about the perfect hole that never had any trout in it, and learned a secret about big browns. Some monster brown trout only feed at night, and in order to escape the pressure of stocked streams that have paths worn into the banks will make their daytime hides in small tributary streams not far from larger water.
I never got to go back to that stream at dusk or dawn...but it is on my List.