You Gotta Break a Few Rods in the Process
With 50 years as a fly rod design pioneer under his belt, Don set the bar high: Build the finest saltwater fly rod in the world, period. Of course, that's easier said than done. The team decided they had to start from scratch, with the idea that every inch of a fly rod has different performance needs because it must accomplish different tasks. Since this kind of precise, inch-by-inch analysis had never been done before, Steve and Kerry had to put their heads together and invent an arsenal of new quantitative testing methods, machines and software.
MEANWHILE, JERRY WAS HARD AT WORK defining the fishing and casting characteristics the new rod needed to have. He imagined a rod that could help anglers of all skill levels "put the fly closer to the fish" in a wide variety of situations. A rod that would allow an angler to concentrate on the fish instead of the cast. As he and Don began the design process, they determined that the secret lay in the ability to feel the line load, rather than the rod flex, throughout the casting stroke.
THE ONLY WAY TO REALIZE A HIGH LEVEL of "line feel" was to radically reduce the swing weight of the rod itself. With this in mind, Steve, the material science guru, started testing a wide range of exotic materials, from quartz and titanium to the latest aerospace composites. Unsatisfied with the performance of these materials, the team went back into the lab and developed Generation 5 Technology, a completely new way of constructing rod blanks. By precisely placing different modulus strengths of graphite along the length of a given rod, the new Modulus Positioning System (MPS) proved to be the solution everyone was looking for.
WITH GENERATION 5 TECHNOLOGY IN PLACE, the team began to build and test literally hundreds of prototypes, searching for the correct MPS combinations that Jerry required. Of course, when fishability is how you judge a rod's performance, you have to fish. Jerry and a host of other anglers pushed these rods to their limits on the Outer Banks, the Keys, San Francisco Bay, Costa Rica and Christmas Island. They cast ridiculously big poppers into howling winds. Fought huge tarpon on wispy bonefish rods. And, yes, broke dozens of prototypes doing things that made guides cringe around the world. Along the way, improvements were made, flaws corrected and the Xi2 began to take shape. The result of this strenuous development process was, we admit, three years of fun, great memories and what we now believe are the finest saltwater fly rods in the world.
MEANWHILE, JERRY WAS HARD AT WORK defining the fishing and casting characteristics the new rod needed to have. He imagined a rod that could help anglers of all skill levels "put the fly closer to the fish" in a wide variety of situations. A rod that would allow an angler to concentrate on the fish instead of the cast. As he and Don began the design process, they determined that the secret lay in the ability to feel the line load, rather than the rod flex, throughout the casting stroke.
THE ONLY WAY TO REALIZE A HIGH LEVEL of "line feel" was to radically reduce the swing weight of the rod itself. With this in mind, Steve, the material science guru, started testing a wide range of exotic materials, from quartz and titanium to the latest aerospace composites. Unsatisfied with the performance of these materials, the team went back into the lab and developed Generation 5 Technology, a completely new way of constructing rod blanks. By precisely placing different modulus strengths of graphite along the length of a given rod, the new Modulus Positioning System (MPS) proved to be the solution everyone was looking for.
WITH GENERATION 5 TECHNOLOGY IN PLACE, the team began to build and test literally hundreds of prototypes, searching for the correct MPS combinations that Jerry required. Of course, when fishability is how you judge a rod's performance, you have to fish. Jerry and a host of other anglers pushed these rods to their limits on the Outer Banks, the Keys, San Francisco Bay, Costa Rica and Christmas Island. They cast ridiculously big poppers into howling winds. Fought huge tarpon on wispy bonefish rods. And, yes, broke dozens of prototypes doing things that made guides cringe around the world. Along the way, improvements were made, flaws corrected and the Xi2 began to take shape. The result of this strenuous development process was, we admit, three years of fun, great memories and what we now believe are the finest saltwater fly rods in the world.
