If you follow the progression of Skagit-style spey lines on our blog at all, you know that we’ve been pretty excited lately about two trends – the development of better shorter heads, and the development of intermediate density Skagit heads. Short Heads, Intermediate Heads We like fishing modern short Skagit heads (like the RIO Max…
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switch rods
Jordan Sly’s Trout Swinging Rig
Jordan Sly is back today, this time with another information-packed post for our Expert Rig series. Jordan Sly’s Trout Swinging Rig Here at Alaska West our river is just asking to have a fly swung through the water column. Swinging flies for trout is not only fun, but it is also often very effective and…
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Try a Mono Running Line on Your Switch Rod
If you’ve read many of the posts about spey fishing on our blog, you know that a lot of Deneki-folk prefer mono running lines on our two-handed rods. There’s a lot of personal preference in running line choice for sure. Mono running lines have some drawbacks – notably a bit of a learning curve in…
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Sage ONE Switch Rod – 8116-4 Review
When we heard that the switch rods in Sage’s ONE lineup would be 11’6″ long, we got pretty excited, for two reasons. Rods north of 11′ tend to work a lot better for our ‘short spey’ applications of switch rods. Yeah, an 11′ rod might overhead cast better…but in our world we don’t overhead cast…
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Spey and Switch Fishing for Trout – An Update
Way back in the almost prehistoric year of 2009, we wrote a series of posts on our blog about spey fishing for trout – why you should do it, what gear you should consider, and some tactics you should use. Those posts have turned into classics – they’re really popular with our readers, which always…
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Two Handers in Colorado?
We love spey fishing and we write about it a lot on our blog. Our experience fishing spey rods comes largely from ‘traditional’ spey-oriented fisheries in the Northwest – swinging for king salmon at Alaska West, and for steelhead at BC West. In recent years we’ve also done a lot of two-handed fishing for trout…
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Sage 6119-4 TCX Switch Rod Review
It’s another chapter in the story of the Short Spey Revolution! Background Earlier this year we posted our review of the Sage 8119-4 TCX Switch rod – the heaviest in Sage’s line of very fast “long switch/short spey” rods. We’re totally in love with this rod; in fact your fearless editor has had a very…
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Sage TCX Switch Rod Review
Last year at IFTD we told you about Sage’s new line of TCX switch rods. We’ve finally gotten enough time in fishing one that we feel competent to write up a review. The past few weeks we fished the 8119-4 TCX a whole bunch at Alaska West, and guess what – we’re in love. About…
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Lake Fishing with Switch Rods
We’ve got our fourth of four videos today in our mini-series of videos on lake fishing. After getting an introduction to fly fishing on lakes, some tips on lake fishing with a tough backcast, and a look at fly selection for lake fishing, now we get to learn about using switch rods on lakes. In…
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Airflo Skagit Switch Review
Back in September we told you about Airflo’s new Skagit Switch Heads – a potential solution to the “nobody makes a modern spey line for my switch rod” problem. Since the early version of the head that we got our hands on at IFTD, Airflo has gone through a couple more iterations. Last month we…
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