Last weekend, I was fishing my way from place to place on the Rappahannock to collect pictures for my book (Wade Fishing the Rappahannock), and took the lazy man’s approach to stowing my rod.
I opened the back window on the truck and slid the rod through to rest it on the floorboard next to me. Then… off to the next spot. At the last place I was going to fish, I did a cast and the top two sections of the rod launched downstream. “No biggie”, I thought to myself and pulled everything back to reassemble. When I tried to plug the top section into the bottom, I discovered that the rod had split at the joint.
What happened was that the rod jiggled loose bouncing around and flexing out of the back window; with the sections separating from their normal tight fit. With the slack in the joint, the top section did not have the entire bottom section to “grab” against and that pushed the entire force of the cast against a smaller section of the joint. It eventually cracked and snapped.
Dang…. that was my favorite FFB San Juan 5/6wt. I’ll have to cough up the fee and buy a new section since this was my fault and not a manufacturing error.
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Unless stated otherwise, this article was authored by Steve Moore