Owning the right gear is essential, if not integral, to the process of fishing.
Having said that, most anglers, and I’ll admit right here and now that I am no exception, are also notorious gear-junkies. They will rarely, if ever, admit to just how many rods and reels they actually own.
This is especially true when it comes to fly fishers. So I am willing to come clean. Yes, I do own a lot of fishing rods. The sad part is that I don’t get to use any of them nearly as much as I would like to.
One rod that I have become truly intrigued with, if not enthralled with, is the two-handed switch rod.
Over the past 10 years or so, there has been a literal explosion in the popularity of long, two-handed or spey rods, which have been developed specifically for anglers in the Pacific Northwest where fishing large rivers and streams is more often the rule than the exception. With this in mind, rod manufacturers have subsequently introduced a hybrid spey rod which has come to be referred to as a “switch” or “two-hand assist” rod.
Switch rods are shorter, usually lighter-weight spey rods that can be cast as either single-handed or double-handed rods.
The concept behind the switch rod is a fly rod that includes the inherent design and advantages found in a spey rod, such as the ability to make longer, more effortless casts, with pronounced advantages in line control – while at the same time retaining the practicality of a standard, lightweight, single-handed fly rod. The result is a highly versatile fly rod of moderate length, usually 10 to 12 feet, that can be fished using either a single-handed or double-handed casting technique.
To better understand switch rods, you first have to understand the whole two-handed spey rod concept. Two-handed spey rods or “long rods” as they are often referred to, were developed for casting on Scotland’s salmon streams, most notably the River Spey. Back then, anglers needed rods that were long enough to load and unload a cast, but without the need to aerialize their backcast, quite simply because they were fishing on rivers with deep, swift currents and high crowded river banks. In time, this long-rod technique became popular on the rivers and streams of the Canadian Pacific Northwest where there were similar stream conditions.
Although most spey casters tend to be salmon and steelhead aficionados, many anglers, myself included, have started branching out and using two-handed rods for smaller fish species such as trout.
To go along with these switch rods, a number of line manufacturers have developed specialty lines that incorporate a powerful front taper to help modestly skilled casters like myself cast better with tighter loops. Most are sold with several tip sections which allow an angler to quickly and easily remove one tip, such as an eight-foot floating tip, and replace it with one of several sinking tips to get the fly down into deeper and/or fast flowing waters.
Another advantage of a switch rod over a regular single-handed rod is the fact that a shorter angler such as myself, no longer has to worry about wading out too far into fast waters and having to fight the current.
With a switch rod I can stay closer to shore and still make 75 to 100-foot casts and drifts. This is even more advantageous when winter casting to open waters, when you really don’t want to venture anywhere near the slippery shoreline.
The real advantage to a switch rod for me, however, is that casting requires a lot less effort, especially on those days when I spend the whole day making continuous casts. I find that my arms, quite simply, get less tired.
