Greetings from south Texas

I need some recommendation on a good travel fly rod blank. I would like a 5 wt, 8'6"-9' rod with segments of 18" or less. I prefer to build only high quality rods.

Any recommendations will be appreciated and thank you in advance for your help.

Greg

Contact Dan Craft. He is one of the board sponcors on the left.
He has some awesome blanks and provides top notch customer
service. I just received an 8wt 5piece and like I said, Awesome!!

Happy Casting!!

Raymond Adams
Eventually, all things merge, and a river runs through it..

Dan Craft has good blanks as does St Croix and many others. You may wish to look at the CCS Data Site and choose based on the information provided. That can help you find the characteristics you are looking for in a rod or blank.

Stan Grace
Helena, MT
"Our best is none too good"

I built my travel rod on a Winston LT 8'9" travel blank about 10 years ago (Before I heard of Dan Craft). It is an excellent general purpose rod. I fish with it 90% of the time and I have many other rods.

You can go in a Winston shop and cast a factory rod. Then if you like it you can order the blank through the shop at the same price as you can get it mail order.

The factory rod seems to me to use too many too small guides poorly placed. I like the one I built better.

My recommendations for StCroix SC IV travel blanks

Kim

Looks to me like your going to need a 6 or 7 piece rod blank to get your length. Dan Craft has a 7 piece blank that is about 17 inches long if I remember right. Nice blanks, Cabela's and others also make some, I've fished a few that fished pretty nice, but none that were good enough to use as my primary rod in any application.

I have a 7 pc 9' 5wt Elkhorn rod that is quite nice. the sections are 17" long. Not as stiff as one would expect from a 7 pc rod. I would describe it as a med fast rod that will load with a short line using a 5 wt. The rods and blanks can be had at fly fishing shows for 1/2 price. I've heard good things about March Brown and Cabelas 7 pc rods but I don't believe that blanks are available for either of those.