Aside from the material itself, some of my other favorite features of this wading jacket are the waterproof, sealed zippers on the double, external chest pockets–the perfect place to keep a camera and a flybox–and the roomy, billed hood of the jacket, sure to keep your noggin dry during a downpour. Other well-designed features include micro-fleece-lined hand-warmer pockets, a rod holder strap–a great place to secure your rod while getting your picture taken, the net hook on the back of the jacket, and the neoprene-lined cuffs, which can be cinched tight to keep water out. The designers of this jacket also made it really easy to get it adjusted correctly. There are cord adjustments in the waist and hood, and the cut of the jacket is roomy enough to fit winter layers beneath, yet not so baggy that it gets in the way casting and landing fish. For more information about Frogg Toggs fishing products, visit www.froggtoggs.com. There, you’ll find their full offering of fishing and outdoor rainwear.

The backpack is also set up to hold an 100 ounce water bladder and on the exterior there is a mounted rod-tube holder, making storage a breeze. The pack also features highly-adjustable waist and shoulder straps for a snug fit, and is padded for more comfort carrying heavy loads.

On the front of the pack, you’ll find a plethora of great storage options for your flies, floatant, and necessary tools. With two flip-down fly work-stations, changing flies mid-stream is much easier than it used to be, and these removable foam fly patches also serve a great option for storing flies while out fishing.

The flyfishing pack by Fishpond has two chest pockets with sealed zippers, four large interior mesh pockets, and numerous smaller pockets in which to stow your tippet, floatant, dry shake, weights, and strike indicators. As far as the well-designed bells and whistles go, it features a D-ring to attach your landing net to and hemostat holders, so they don’t flop around on you while wading across the river.

As a fly-fishing guide, I’ve used this pack in a variety of situations, from hiking into the backcountry in Yellowstone to floating down the tailwater rivers in western NC and eastern TN. I’ve been most impressed with its thoughtful design, comfort, adjustability, and versatility. It’s one of my favorite pieces of gear I own and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

The Fishpond Wasatch Tech Pack is available in Deepwater Blue, or Marsh, which is an olive drab color. It retails for $189.00 and features Fishpond’s Lifetime warranty.

The case itself is clear with a black rubber lining inside.  An external jack allows for full use of an iPhone or iPod microphone and volume commands.  The built-in cable manager holds earphones and cables.  The rubber liner doubles as o-ring seal and the case features stainless steel hardware.  This case is built tough…reminding me of the yellow phones that Nextel built for the construction industry.  Solid.

The MSRP for the Pelican i1015 case is about $20.  That’s a pretty inexpensive investment to ensure that your expensive investment is protected around H2O.  Although the case seems a bit overkill and bulky it performs its purpose well and will provide you a calming peace for the safety of your iPhone or iPod.

For once though, it’s me who can speak with experience and make a recommendation. I got turned on to the “Gulp!” bait by Berkley. I’ve been using these baits for the past three years and testify that they are fun to throw and drum up regular action. Specifically, I use the 4” Sinking Minnow in a Pumpkinseed color. This color seems to disappear off the store racks and when I find them, I’ll buy them to stock my tackle-box. I marry the bait up with a 1/0 Gamakatsu offset shank worm. I do not use weight.

I said that this bait is fun to throw. It sinks very slowly and responds to the slightest twitch of the pole tip. It is fun to try to simulate the movement of a struggling minnow. Bass love it! When you bury the hook barb in the body of the worm, it is virtually weedless. I throw into lily pads with confidence…land it on a pad and often as I pull it off, I get slammed!

Just this past weekend I invited my son to join me with some friends as we fished a small pond in northern Illinois. My son hasn’t fished in quite awhile and was bemoaning how fishing had become boring to him…he said he had no luck. I fixed him up with my bait and sure enough…even my “unlucky fisherman of a son” had a fun and productive morning with the smallies.

I’m not a fishing pro and I know I don’t write with the authority…but for a regular guy like me…this is the bait. All I need is my pole, and a pack of baits and hooks in my pocket…traveling light and easy.

A great bait to work ponds with weed or work shorelines and docks from a boat.

Because I’m devilishly handsome, Orvis shipped me a 4-pc, 8.5′ 5wt “mid-flex” prototype of their yet-to-be-released ”Helios” fly rod — a rod said to be even lighter than their Zero Gravity series.

“How can it be lighter than Zero?” you ask? Well, despite consulting Albert Einstein on this one, we’re not sure, but I will testify that the rod is light. In fact, the box arrived, I hefted the tube, thought it was empty, and figured I was the victim of a practical joke played by Hathaway at Orvis.

Turns out the joke was on me. There was a rod in the tube — a prototype so new it lacked the Orvis name, the “Helios” label, and even the final cosmetics. 

A call to Tom Rosenbauer at Orvis was oddly unproductive; manufacturers are usually keen to babble endlessly (to the point of nausea) about the technology behind their shiny new stuff, but Rosenbauer cagily told me to forget about the technology and just report my impressions.

Hmmm. The Mystery Pitch. Interesting.

First Impressions

Let’s just get this out of the way; I’m not easily bowled over by high-tech fly rod technology. One friend jokes that I’m a low modulus guy stuck in a high modulus fly fishing world, and there’s a ring of truth to that.

I fish a lot of bamboo and fiberglass, and own damned few graphite rods, which I often find stiff and lacking in the kind of feedback I want in a fly rod.

With this as a backdrop, my first lawn casts with the 8.5′ “mid-flex” Helios were a surprise; the rod cast smoothly at what you might call “normal trout ranges” and shockingly — I even felt a little flex under the cork grip at longer distances.

At short ranges, the rod lacked the kind of feel I get from my higher-mass bamboo and glass rods, but it was accurate and not overly stiff or clumsy.

Aerial mends were easy due to the light weight of the rod, though the higher line speeds generated by high-modulus rods give you less time to make the mends (compared to low modulus rods), so I’m calling this one a wash.

Overall — for a rod I would have told you was not interesting to me — I was pleasantly surprised.

Field Testing (or, It’s a Hard Life)

One reason why I’ve turned down some testing gigs is because I don’t want to spend my my precious fly fishing time field-testing equipment I don’t like.

I liked the Helios enough that I went ahead and float-tubed an alpine lake, fished a technical section of the Upper Sacramento River, and even hit some pocket water with Local Kung Fu Guide Wayne Eng, who fished the rod most of the evening.

From the float tube — hardly the ideal environment for a medium-flexing 8.5′ rod — I was able to cast for distance, and more importantly, do so accurately.

Popping a sinking line out of the water was no big deal (a task that’s not much fun with softer rods), and threading a damsel nymph between lily pads was a straightforward, no-hassle job.

The same held true on the technical water, where you sometimes have to make long casts, and you always have to make long roll casts.

My overall impression was of a very smooth fly rod — one that cast for distance without folding, yet fished well at shorter distances.

The Helios bore little resemblance to the “parking lot rods” that largely soured me on graphite, though it’s no match for my softer, low-modulus rods at short ranges.

Frankly, that’s to be expected; life is a series of tradeoffs, and the majority of fly rods nowadays seem tuned to cast just a bit further than is useful for most trout fishing.

Then again, they’re largely being sold to people who fish less then five times a year, so that distance bias helps sell rods.

Wayne Eng spent several hours with the rod fishing pocket water, and his face positively lit up. “Smooth” was the word he used over and over to describe the rod, and — sadly — he got to experience it with a couple of decent fish (I never caught anything bigger than 12″ on the Helios).

He said it was “very trouty” and because he has scads more experience with current rod technology, I’d suggest his word carries a little weight.

He gave it a thumbs up.

Tough Stuff

One Orvis staffer told me their exclusive thermoplastic resin technology actually placed them ahead of the competitors they’d lagged behind for so many years; they were able to build extremely light fly rods that weren’t brittle or fragile.

Time will be the judge of the truth of that statement, but I’ll say this – it certainly seems durable. Orvis is going to cringe when they read this, but twice I smacked the Helios very hard against solid, non-moving objects, and both times I was practicing the traditional “my Wonderdog broke your rod” excuses while examining the tip.

No breaks, no cracks, no excuses — not even after fishing the rod a couple times since.

That’s not exactly conclusive laboratory evidence, but it’s the kind of thing that allows a rod company to offer a long-term, no-questions warranty without breaking out in a rash.

The Beauty of High Modulus

Here I’ll make an embarrassing admission; on long casts, my tip (fly rod tip) tends to wander a bit, and low modulus materials often amplify that.

It’s one area where high modulus works well, and in this case, it was true. High modulus rods are also good nymph rods; they’re light — so highsticking all day doesn’t warp your shoulder — and they react very quickly for a more positive hookset.

Naturally, I can’t comment directly on those characteristics because I’m an effete dry fly fisher who rarely nymphs, but if you’re into lightweight rods for nymphing – a wholly quantifiable characteristic — then the break-resistant Helios is probably a worth a try.

The Rod

The Helios I fished was a prototype — and one of the few things I learned about the production models (which a little Woodward & Bernstein work tells me will be called “Zero Gravity Helios” rods) is the blanks will remain an attractive olive-colored blank but the wraps will be different — probably a deeper burgundy. [Update: Wrong. The blanks are dark colored in the final production models, and the reel seats are different from the photograph]

In the pursuit of lower overall rod weight, Orvis abandoned their attractive skeletonized reel seat from the Zero Gravity rods in favor of a seat with a graphite insert.

I liked the old one, but don’t have any significant problems with the new one, which hold reels tightly. It just doesn’t look as nice.

I will admit to disliking the 7″ Orvis cork grip, which most would call a “superfine” style.

It’s too long for a rod this length and weight, and even worse, I’m a total crank about grips, and believe the superfine and Western style grips that come with most modern graphite rods aren’t very comfortable over a long day of fishing.

In other words, the whole industry is wrong, and I’m right. (Just for context.)

Let’s chalk that up to a personal gripe, and hope that the rest of the world starts conforming to my singular view of the universe.

The Last Cast

Orvis is going to make a lot of noise about the feather-esque heft of their Zero Gravity Helios rods, and in a marketing-oriented universe, it makes perfect sense.

Still, I happily fish rods several ounces heavier than the 8.5′ Helios, so the durability and fishability of the of the Helios is a more useful concept to me than the weight.

Given my frequent rants against brittle fly rods — which can ruin a day, if not a trip — I’ve gotta believe Orvis is onto something here.

Still, the measure of any fly rod is how it fishes, and I was nicely surprised by the smoothness of the Helios, though it lacks the smooth, like buttah feedback of my heavier, low-modulus rods.

If I nymphed a lot I probably would own a rod like this, and if I was casting all day from a wind-besieged drift boat, I’d be damned happy I’d brought this thing along.

If I was a dealer, the whole package — the blank, the really nice tube, the cosmetics… they’d make me happy. It’s about time they started making graphite rods that didn’t look like military radio antennas.

By any account Orvis fell behind the “cutting edge” rod companies during the boom years of the 1990s and early 2000s, and their attempts to catch up weren’t always graceful.

It’s possible they’re now racing ahead of the pack, though the Sage, Winston and other partisans will no doubt have something to say about that.