Understanding fly rod actions & fly line combinations

Contributor Anton hartman says that understanding what a fly line is designed to do will make a big difference to your success rate on the water.

- Anton hartman

Knowing which line to buy for your new rod is something most anglers have struggled with for many years. You walk into a shop and see 30 different fly lines and you don’t really know what to look for. The assistant sells you the most popular line and you put it onto your reel, only to find that it doesn’t feel as if it’s loading your rod correctly. I’ve been experimenting with virtually all the line tapers available on the market for the past ten years and in doing so I’ve come to realise that the line weight written on a rod or a line can very often become the biggest problem anglers face on the water. Understanding what each line is designed to do, combined with identifying your casting ability, will make a big difference to your success rate on the water. You will find that experimenting with different line weights and tapers might make your rod come alive and make your fishing a much more pleasant experience.

My aim in this article is to help explain the different actions in modern fly rods and fly line weights and tapers, so that when next you enter the fly shop, you have a better knowledge of the relationship between the rod and line.