Please discuss the relative merits of spining a fly rod up or down to prioritize it's forecast or backcast/fighting characteristics. Thanks in advance. J M Jacobs, Lake Worth, Fl

I won't even begin to get into this. But, if you look in the volume 4 #4 issue of Rodmaker in the Q&A section, Mr. Kirkman gives a very brief but definitive view of what happens when you locate the guides relative to any of the 4 possible positions --- spine up or spine down, hard axis up or hard axis down. It becomes apparent that each position will slightly affect the way the rod performs.

Joseph, You are opening a real can of worms here and probably each post will have a different answer. In the end it will be your on choice and whatever you feel comfortable with. Personally I put the guides on the spine as I feel that this gives the most distance and best accuracy. Unfortunately I spend more time casting than I do fighting a fish so I prefer the set up that will maximize the casting of the rod. However if you do a lot of sight casting to feeding fish where the ratio of hook ups to casts is higher you may prefer to have a better fish fighting rod.

On all my rods I have started finding the natural concave bend of the blank and positioning it so that my guides are on it in such a way that the tip points up. This gives me the stiffest part of the rod for lifting line and fighting fish. Make sense? In other words the bend is down and the but and tip are up. So on fly and spinning the guides are underneath this and on regular type casting the guides are on top. I just feel I get the most power for fish fighting and best casting distance. Of course this means the spine is somewhere off to the side I guess, but I've tried both ways and this works best for me.