I recentently decided that I needed to add an 8 weight fly rod to my arsenal. It will be used to occasionally to fish for bass and also on the Texas coast for Specks and Redfish. Being a casting rod type guy my fly fishing experience is limited. To make a long story short I built a St, Croix SCIV which out to be to be a real rocket. I built it with Fuji Sic strippers and Sic single foots the rest of the way out. I have only test casted it prior to building it and practiced with it on a neighborhood pond. Even with my limited experience and old man casting stroke I was able to cast almost all of WF line with it. With a little practice I feel that I could easily get it into a shooting line. My question is, do any of you ever step up in line weight? By overlining , will it still cast as good?

Thanks and God Bless All,
Gerald McCasland

if you have a casting rod that is rated to throw 1/2 ounce lures, and you hang a 1 ounce lure on it, will it cast as far? Fly rods are simply no different than spinning or casting rods when it comes to casting.

Your fly rod is rated to throw about 1/2 ounce. That's about how much 30 feet of 8 weight line weighs. 30 feet of a 9 weight line weighs a bit more (about 5/8 ounce I think) and thus you are overloading the rod a bit at the same casting distance.

I wish the fly rod and fly line manufacturers did a better job explaining what the line weight designation numbers mean. They correspond to weight over a given length. Your fly rod is rated to throw 1/2 ounce of weight, so it will throw 1/2 ounce of 4 weight line, or 1/2 ounce of 12 weight line, or 1/2 ounce of 8 weight line. But the amount of line you'd have out to get that 1/2 ounce on each respective line will be different. Make sense?

For all practical purposes, you could overline the rod by one line weight and it wouldn't change much, but I doubt you could get quite as much distance in this case. Or, with that much line out, you could underline it by one weight and maybe get even more distance.

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Gerald,

Good morning,

Tom as usual is right on.

Overlineing is common practice as most rods were labled for use with double taper line thus the older system of rating a rod as a 3/4 4/5 5/6 etc some mfgs still use the sytem.

Take the 4/5 : what is meant is that the rod is designed to throw a 4wt double taper or a 5wt forward line. if your rod is not labled with dual wts
dont worry the same rule applies.

I typicaly use one line wt heavier in a wt forward for a given rod. My favorite rod is a 10' 6wt I use 7wf line on it and somtimes if Im bass fishing and not casting far I use an 8wf line so I can throw some Pretty hefty streamers.


One thing to remember is to match a line /rod to the flies your throwing. My 6wt is plenty strong enough for most bass fishing I do and the same rod will throw a 6wt line a country mile but a 6wf line will not turn over many of the bass bugs that I use.


Happy wraps and TLS "John"

If you're throwing that much line already, you're probably using the right line weight (not to mention that you're obviously a sound fly caster). As Tom hinted, if you need to cast farther, drop down one line weight (i.e. try a 7).

As you build more fly rods, you'll discover that various manufacturers sometimes under-rate (and occasionally over-rate) a fly blank. While their suggestions are good starting points, I find it helpful to take my newly-built rod to the local fly shop and cast it using various line weights (keeping in mind the type of fishing I'll be doing). Since I drop a fair amount of cash at this particular fly shop, they're always willing to send me out in the casting yard with a couple of reels.

One of my favorite 4 wts. was labelled by the manufacturer as a 3 wt. However, I knew I would use it for short to moderate casts, and in windy conditions. So, a 4 wt. line was a better choice.