Your Steelhead Rigs

When more than 80 of you really thoughtfully wrote up your steelhead rigs for our free Bougle contest, you helped created a really cool resource.  Already more than 1600 unique anglers have checked out that page, and they’ve no doubt gotten some new ideas on steelhead rigging, at the very least.

Looking at all those entries, we thought it would also be pretty cool to have some sort of summary of what you folks are all fishing out there.  So, we poured ourselves a giant cup of coffee, fired up the spreadsheet, and put together the numbers you see below.

This was not a very scientific process.  We’re pretty sure it’s all basically right, but please don’t low-hole us on the river if we made a boo boo in the data.

There was so much detail in your responses that we could have looked at any of dozens of pieces of the rig (backing knot showdown, anyone?), but we decided to keep it really simple – how many hands, what weight line, who made the rod and who made the line.

OK, on with our ‘findings’.

One or Two Hands?

You mostly fish two-handed rods for steelhead.  This isn’t super surprising, since we do too and our site has a lot of spey-oriented content on it.

If you said you’re fishing a switch rod, we called it a one-hander if you listed an overhead line, and a two-hander if you fished a spey line.

Two Handed – 77%

One Handed – 23%

What Weight Rod?

No real shockers here.  This question is a little funny since it includes both single- and double-handed rods and because spey line designations vary so much.  Anyhow, here it is.

6 weight – 10%

7 weight – 49%

8 weight – 31%

9 weight – 6%

10 weight – 3%

Who Made the Rod?

Lots and lots of different companies!

Sage – 24%

ECHO – 15%

Burkheimer – 9%

Winston – 6%

Scott – 5%

Redington – 5%

Meiser – 4%

Orvis – 4%

Loomis – 3%

Guideline – 3%

Beulah – 3%

Lamiglas – 3%

Maxwell, CND, Cabela’s, Pieroway, Riverwatch, Red Truck, TFO, Powell, Anderson, Vision, Berkeley, Loop, T&T and Custom – all ~ 1%

Who Made the Line?

The ‘big boys’ dominate in the line category.

Airflo – 45%

Rio – 33%

SA – 14%

Nextcast – 3%

Godshall, Cortland, Guideline and Wulff – all ~ 1%

What Made the Reel?

UPDATE – We didn’t run the reel numbers, so we’re really grateful to our reader and buddy Jesse Robbins for taking the time to put them together and send them in.  Thanks so much, Jesse.

Lots and lots of different reels in use out there.

Hardy (classic) – 19%

Lamson – 13%

Abel – 9%

Hatch – 8%

Ross – 6%

Orvis – 5%

Sage – 4%

Speyco – 4%

Danielsson – 3%

ECHO – 3%

Hardy (new) – 3%

Loop – 3%

Redington – 3%

Cortland, Galvan, HFR, Intrepid, Kamikaze, Mohlin, Nautilus, Okuma, Saracione, Scientific Anglers, St. George, STH, Teton, Tibor, Van Staal – all ~ 1%

Conclusion

And that concludes our presentation.  Hopefully at least some of you ‘engineering types’ found the numbers interesting.

Thanks again for contributing – now go out there and catch one!

More on Steelhead Rigging

• Leaders
• Favorite Trailer Hooks
• Bullet Weights