The best rods are not always the most expensive ones. You’ll never regret spending those extra bucks once you get the rod in your hands and see how well it performs compared to your old rod. Guides start with a hook keeper, then one SiC stripping guide followed with hard chrome snake guides. These hold up longer, even with hard usage. The Recon has been one of our favorite rods, and this 4-weight version is terrific. Here is the most important distance category for picking the best all around 5-weight rod. Then, maintaining tight loops on your backcast, especially at the longer distances, was very difficult and we would usually give it up and hope for a better day. Better now, with more line in the air, but the G series was still a little better in both feel and accuracy. A lot heavier in hand than the Pure, and the stiffer tip is not giving me much feel. Tippet materials are getting stronger every year, and today we end up fishing 6x, 6.5X, and 7x fluorocarbon much of the time, trying to get that perfect drift to entice a big fish to sip in a fly. How do you guys view the Yellowstone Angler annual rod shootouts? Yellowstone Angler 2019 Four Weight Shootout - Duration: 6:54. I’m surprised that both Sage rods are well down the list, but their performance scores were just not good enough to rate them higher. Since this is a softer rod than the Zephrus, we settled on using the lighter Trout line but this rod had the power to handle the heavier Infinity nearly as well. The Clearwater is finished in a dark gray color with dark olive guide wraps. As for reels, this year we again decided to use one of our all-time favorites, the Galvan Torque (T-5), loaded with 100 yards of 20 lb. This is a fast action rod, a tiny bit stiffer and a tad slower in action than the Helios 3F, but still a very good casting rod. This is more or less cut and dried, but some rods, like the G. Loomis Asquith have the blanks rolled in Japan and then the rod is completed here in the US at the Loomis plant in Woodland, WA. Howard Croston, Hardy’s rod design genius in England, has given us another outstanding rod that performs extremely well at all distances. Lastly, the rod sock is superior, and will dry out quickly even if you put your rod away wet. These come in two models, the Amplitude Smooth Trout, which is a standard size line, and the Amplitude Smooth Infinity, which is a half line size heavier. The best Presentation Rods need to perform exceptionally well at short distances. It also has one of the heaviest swing weights in our Shootout. Performance at 25 feet:  18.5 points out of 20. It’s perhaps a little heavy in swing weight, and this as well as its stiffness, hurt its score at 25 feet. This is a very pleasant rod for fishing dries, where you are doing a lot of false casting. Learn to rig your own terminal tackle exactly the way the pro’s do. Equals the DXF but rods like the Recon and Sky were much better. Douglas – Lifetime warranty. Usually takes 2-4 weeks. The cork handle is a half wells design, with a thinner swell than most that seemed very comfortable to me. Winston –  Lifetime warranty to original owner. In past Shootouts we tried measuring swing weight in other ways, including calculations for the Moment of Inertia, taking the weight of all 4 sections individually and then plugging these figures into an equation. Here’s a mid-priced rod that put in a good performance across the board. Hardy ZEPHRUS ULTRALITE 8’9” #4   $679.95. The rest of the guides are the finest, flexible, titanium Recoil single-foot guides that you will never break. With your new rod they include a FedEx call tag so that it does not cost you anything to return your broken rod. I found the locking rings easy to grip and tighten. A burled blackwood insert is used. The cosmetics and components of this rod are similar to its shorter brother. As a starter rod, the Aetos is hard to beat! A gorgeous amboyna burl wood insert is used to complete this attractive rod. I thought the larger, wider single ring on the Helios 3F was much easier to grip and seemed to lock up better. If you look at the best performing rods in general, they have stiffer butt and midsections and softer tips. For fly lines, we had two on hand, one a standard size Scientific Anglers Amplitude Trout for all the Presentation rods, and then SA’s half size larger line, the Amplitude MPX, both in WF-5-F. For leaders, we again used our own Yellowstone Angler hand-tied 12-foot 4x leaders that utilize a two-foot tippet. In all, this is an extremely attractive rod. Another stiff rod, the Avantt, was slightly better. The epoxy coatings were excellent. This is one fantastic looking rod – one of the very best in our Shootout. 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