This weekend, my mother-in-law busted a fly rod I'd made for her. It's a 3F864, and it broke about half-way down the tip section, as she was fighting a decent fish (16" or so). She was totally convinced that she pressured the fish too much. I told her that was practically impossible, because she was using 6X tippet (and I know from watching her, that if anything, she doesn't fight fish agressively enough). The 6X tippet should have broken way before the blank would have been overloaded. And, I know that the guide spacing was good, as I pay very close attention to that.

I told her that one of two things happened.

1. Most likely, she unknowingly dinged the rod in that area earlier, and the decent fish caused the fracture to spread and the blank to break.

2. One other unlikely, but possible, scenario is that the blank had a defect. She had not used the rod more than 4 or 5 hours total, and this was the first good fish she had caught on it.

Short of high-sticking, is it possible to fight a fish aggressively enough to break a 4wt. blank, even if you're using 6X tippet?

Seems a bit of a long shot to me. I use 6x tippet all the time with 2-4 wt rods and have never put enough pressure in them to break a blank. I have however broken lots of tippets on fish, rocks, trees etc. The only one I have seen broken was on a hang up on a rock, it was a 2 wt I made for a friend. He said he only flexed it about half way down and it snapped. Then I remember him telling me that the trip before he dropped it off a bridge and it landed in the creek undoubtly smacking the tip on a rock or debris and causing a fracture that weakened the blank, awaiting a quick flex and snap! If it only the first time she really put a good bend on it, besides your inital stress distribution I say it was a faulty blank. At least send it back for the company to look at, and reorder the tip section. Don't sweat it too much....

What is the breaking strengh of that 6X tippet (line diameter doesn't mean much in this instance). A full pound of load, if the rod was high sticked, could easily break many 4-weight rods.

But this doesn't rule out that the blank may have been defective or that she had nicked it somehow earlier.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2005 04:43PM by Tom Kirkman.

The breaking strength of the tippet is listed as 3.6 lb.

I can't guarantee that it wasn't "high-sticked" as I wasn't standing right with her, but it wasn't during the netting process (which is when we trout fisherman most often go past that 90 degree bend), and the place we were fishing doesn't require wading, so she was up higher than the water level, which would make "high-sticking" even more unlikely.

I'm just baffled by this.

My understanding is, that if the break was clean it was a flaw in the blank, it shattered and splintered it was overloaded. I have seen both. And the ones that I seen that were just a clean break the rod was not being abused and where they were shattered someone was really stressing the rod.

A tippet that will support 3 pounds on a steady load is more than sufficiently strong to put the rod in jeopardy. If took most any 4 weight rod, suspended a pound or two from the line/tippet and the raised the tip towards the sky, the rod is going to break, probably before the tippet will.

Not saying that this is what she did, but it's one possibility. The tippet itself was not so weak that it was guaranteed to be the weak link in the chain.

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