Echo Announces the Trout Spey and Compact Series at IFTD 2018
With the growing popularity of trout spey, Echo has upped their game with some new lightweight and compact spey rods. They are available in a 2, 3, 4 weight at 11 feet in length. Echo also released a compact spey series that our light in the hand and made for shorter more compact two-handed lines. The compact series sits right in the steelhead size range at 6, 7, and 8 weight at 12 feet in length. Watch the video below to learn more.
Hi, thanks for coming to the ICAST show. My name's Tim Rajeff. I'm the owner of ECHO Fly Rod Company, and we have some new fly rods that we're going to show you in the two-handed world. One other thing that we wanted to do was up our game our trout spey. Trout spey rods have been gaining popularity. Everyone wants to try swinging for trout, so we used our premium material and made a really lightweight series of trout spey rods. The lighter the rod is, the less fatiguing, and the lighter a rod is the more energy stored in the rod is delivered in the line.
With today's series of shorter fly lines, like the Scout and our Switch Float lines, we're able to fish areas with a trout rod that we couldn't before. We have a good series of affordable ... our standard material rods, but we wanted to up the game and that's what the trout spey rod's all about. There are a series of three rods, a two, three, and four weight trout rod eleven feet long.
Sticking with our two-handed new stuff, one of the things that's evolved over the years is switch rods really aren't used what their initial name was implying where they're used to switch from single hand or two-hand. Switch rods, and you'd probably agree, are 98% of the time used as small spey rods, and when you have a short two handed rod it really isn't very efficient and effective, so what we did is we started from scratch and came up with a compact spey series that are really light in the hand. They're in that steel-head size range, six, seven, and eight. They're 12 feet long, and when you hold one of these things it's like, "Oh, my goodness." It's really light; little lighter tip, and again this matches up well with today's shorter, more compact, two-handed lines.
These are all 12 feet long and they're available in a six, seven, and eight. Why are they all the same length? Because heads are now closer in length. Depending on the grain weight you don't see a big difference between a 420 grain line and a 510 or 540 grain line. Those lines are only one foot difference, and the length of the line helps determine the length of the rod, so if you have line that are almost the same length then the rods can be the same length, so we've made it really simple. All the compact spey rods are 12 feet long.
Moving up to our full spey, we've made it easy. We make a trout spey, a compact spey, and a full spey. Just as you can imagine from the name, the full spey series are rods that bend a little more and they're all 13 feet long. They're in that steel-head range, six, seven, and eight, so with these rods a lot of times probably 90% of the people are using some sort of sink-tip system; a Skagit head, and when you snap and fish with a Skagit head you tend to make a little longer stroke. The longer the stroke, the action can be a little more modest, so when you grab one of these full spey rods you'll notice they're lightweight, they're covered nicely, but they're not overly fast and overly stiff.
That's our offering this year on all of our new two-handed rods. Thank you from Tim Rajeff here at the ECHO booth, and visit your local North 40 store and check out all the new stuff.