A few years ago, after cycling half way around Australia, I ended up fly fishing in Exmouth for a month. This is a very exciting destination and I used a TCX10 for all of that time… and it gave me Tennis Elbow! It took three months for the pain to eventually leave…
Now the reason the rod gave me Tennis Elbow is because it had an almost completely rigid butt section, this meant that my body (elbow) had to stop considerably more of the lever in the first instant. So I learned from this and developed a rod with a more forgiving butt section, allowing the flycaster to initially stop less of the rod.
The first prototype, while good, and considerably more gentle in this regards, I felt just a little too slow. So we sped it up. The resulting blank is light, fast and smooth, with an incredibly positive tip. The tip damps perfectly making it possible to throw 5-line on the rod and still see no vibration – indeed this is also our COMPETITION V2 blank – the one that gave me a Bronze Medal in this year’s World Championships in Estonia!
But really it’s a ten-weight. I personally like fishing RIO’s Technical Tarpon Taper but I’ve always preferred fishing these longer heads!
For the World Championships I had Titanium Torzite rings fitted to the rod. This was an experiment – they are supposed to be slicker than SICs and of course Titanium is not only lightweight it is also Saltwater proof. We’ve taken the (rather expensive!) decision to fit them as standard on all HT10 rods. Of course we also fit Snake rings or indeed anything that you’d prefer, but I would take the Titanium Torzite option – they are fantastic rings and IMO the best.
You can find the HT10 here in the Sexyloops Store.
