jonathan erwin
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Tim has a good point. I’ve been shopping in fly shops before and felt sorry for a new guy walking in the door. You shouldn’t have to go through some initiation ceremony to get some help. Especially since some of those new guys, especially older ones, are probably prepared to drop plenty of coin to get kitted out.
But maybe I’m just sensitive to it because, when I got started, a fly shop I frequented (out of necessity) in Colorado treated me– and others who didn’t know the secret grip– like lepers.
Personally, I need more than a 10% discount (via coupon, mark-down, whatever) to convince me to order by mail or drive the 25-30 miles to my nearest– and extremely crowded– Cabelas instead of heading down to my local fly shop. The ability to touch the goods, cast rods in the park across the street, bs with the store staff, and do my small bit to keep a cool business afloat is worth paying a little more. But to each his own; we all have to justify our own expenditures.
This is great place to start for North Texas fishing (and music, beer, etc.): http://texasflycaster.com/
I’ll have to defer to my Ft. Worth brethren regarding outfitters, because I’m not sure who is still over there (Backwoods, maybe?). If you find yourself in Dallas for any reason, Tailwaters in Uptown is a great store with a helpful crew.
I like the CF boxes; but, like Zach, it would be great to have a deeper one for larger flies. And I still haven’t found a box that really does a great job of accomodating weed guards (both the hook-eye to hook bend variety and the mono post variety). I use Plano boxes for some of my bigger bass flies, which all have weed guards, because of this issue.
My CF Permit-sized box (the green one) does an ok job with smaller saltwater flies with weed guards, but if the box was a little deeper, with taller pieces of split foam to keep the weedguards from crushing, I’d by a happy camper.
Zach-
That’s interesting that Scott and Sage passed on the new resin. Any word on whether it had to do with durability? And, if so, I wonder if that had anything to do with Loomis changing the price on the Expeditor program? Thanks,
JEIt’s clicking there now. If you subtract out the shipping time on both ends, I got the last several rods back from Scott in about a week to 10 days. Considering the high quality of the repair, I think that’s outstanding.
Shane–
I live in your area, and most of my fishing is for LMB in area lakes and redfish at the coast. For me, the biggest advantages of a shorter rod are: (1) they can be somewhat easier to handle if you’re fishing out of a little boat; and (2) they give you more leverage if you are trying to keep bass out of heavy cover. But honestly, these advantages are pretty marginal; I can’t think of any fish that I caught with a short rod that I couldn’t have landed with a 9′ rod. And down on the Texas flats (I haven’t fished the rigs or done much jetty fishing), I have never needed the kind of lifting power you get from a rod like the mini mag. Down there, you need to be able to cast quickly and accurately, deal with wind (which includes turning over long-ish leaders), and be able to pick up and re-cast a lot of line if necessary. I’m not sure a rod shorter than 8.5′ provides a major advantage under those conditions. In terms of distance and picking up line, a really short rod sounds like a handicap. But, admittedly, I’ve never tried a rod that short on the flats. The shortest rod that I’ve used down there was a 8’8″ Scott HP, which was great. There was an article in the now-defunct mag “Shallow Water Angler” that dealt with this very issue; it might be on the web somewhere.
