Léonce’s 10WT on its way to Taiwan. 🙂
The HT10 is 137g making it 2g lighter than the Sage X 9ft #10!
Round Two. Entry No 12 – Stu Tripney MCI
The first light of the day was just forcing its way between the narrow gap in the curtains. I lay quiet and ridged as he ran his hands up my shaft. The roughness of his scarred finger tips from years of hard work sent goose bumps rising erratically from my butt to my eyes.
His light blue eyes glanced every so often down at my eyes, as his fingers yet again gently moved down to my butt taking time to slide over it. When a man runs his worked fingers over the butt of a female something just magical happens inside. The skin on his face gradually started to wrinkle and a row of slightly coffee stained teeth started to show. With both hands he cradled me and a smile of satisfaction came over him as he thought I was better looking than his last one. Typical male I thought to myself. As if he had not guessed already I was one proud bitch of a fly rod.
It was the start of the breeding program for us hot torpedo rods and no others had made the trip yet to New Zealand.
There had been two of us HT instructor rods paid for up front. My name was Betty (Betty the Bitch) and my side kick Mabel (Miserable Mabel), carefully designed, built, selected and summoned to the Kingdom of New Zealand .
We both knew it was going to be an amazing adventure, we may even get to go Bungy jumping or at least a spin in a kiwi jet boat when we are there.
We had both overheard, when we were getting our cork handles attached that our new owner was a fly fishing geek, ran some sort of fly fishing school, fly shop and guiding adventures in the South Island of NZ, land of the long white cloud. He had apparently had to eat one can of tuna a day without bread to afford us both and had lost a lot of weight doing so. Hopefully he was back to eating sausages, chips and beans again and back to his normal health for when we arrived. So that he could bend us both over backwards and forwards at will.
No doubt we thought two lonely females would be in safe hands and as it was New Zealand and we were white in colour and everybody over there wears camouflage. We would not be getting abused on the waterways in the purist of the NZ wary trout and would only be used in the casting arena! Little did we know!
We told the others we would send them a good old fashioned postcard when we got there as we thought that way of communication would be more special than using our mobile phones. That’s if there would be any postcards still in circulation. Once we had our final inspection, jags and certificates of health issued, we said our goodbyes to the boring sterile world we had been spawned in.
We were both slid into cotton lined plastic tubes, the tubes were super heavy and purple in colour, there was no flash camouflage rod bags in those days.
Not like, the spoiled Hot Torpedo rods of today.
They get pure comfort, a printed camouflage rod bag and also a proper cool aluminium rod tube. If only the young punks of today knew what us golden oldies had to put up with back in the day, right at the start of Paul’s Hot Torpedo wet dream!
The sound of cardboard and tape and scribbling pens could be heard as the tube I lay inside echoed loudly as the world around me got busy. They wrapped us both separately then sat us together side by side and taped us both together securely. We were glad the humans had some good sense to do this, as its always better to have company when travelling, though we were not sure if they knew that or it was just a plan to save on the shipping.
We were weeks overdue to our destination and we knew our new owner was very keen to get us as he had been pestering Mr Sexy Loops, our old owner, where the fuck were we both?
We could understand why our new owner was slightly pissed off, as he had heard as soon as Paul got his money for us. Paul had quickly gone out and bought three new pairs of second hand socks, five pairs of second hand Y-front’s and beer, getting ready for another one of his fly fishing, casting adventures in someone’s remote gold fish pond and had forgotten about the order for a short while.
Luckily things have changed and Paul is solely the HT rod designer and not in charge of logistics which are now well handled from a fine team of Sexy Loopers based in a remote tree house in Hungary.
It had been quite a pleasant journey and we gently rattled together in our packaging. Our journey stopped quite abruptly just as we entered NZ. The hands of savage women in uniforms ripped open our packaging, squinting at our legal documents. With latex gloves on, they inspected us both from the butts up. We were pretty certain is was because we were white, it was not a racist thing. There was a strong possibility they thought we were made out of some dodgy white powder and solidified by some gang from a Mexican cartel. After a little bit of a debate and another eye ball at our documentation, they slid us back into our tubed homes and wrapped us up again.
The van stopped out side the fly shop and we knew we had made it. Quietly, we rattled in a shivering motion of excitement as we knew we had made it and both in one piece.
Our new owner quickly signed the paperwork for us and thanked the slightly overweight pie eating courier driver.
“You fucking beauty!”, we could hear being shouted from our new owner as he rushed us into the shop and ripped open the packaging like a mental pit bull terrier.
There was paper all over the floor of the shop and once he got us both out of our tubes his hands and eyes were all over us as if he had never seen a fly rod before. He quickly put us both together and attached a fly reel to both of us, which were fully loaded with bright Orange(camo!) fly line and leaders attached.
It was as if he had these reels waiting in anticipation, these were our reels he quickly let us know and we had no choice this was the way it was going to be and he was our master!
He decided the tubes were not the best homes for us and quite heavy for him to carry around. So removed us from the tubes and covered our naked bodies with cloth rod bags borrowed from a couple of other fly rods he had in his collection.
Soon he was sharing us both between both of his hands and forcing us to bend backwards and forwards in his garden, (which he had marketed for years as his specially developed casting arena), with the weight and speed of short and medium lengths of line.
He seemed to be pointing us at targets hoping for us to force the fly line out nice and straight as well as stretching out the full 14ft leader with the fine tip of the leader landing just on each target.
To fuck him up sometimes we refused to take the line anywhere near the target, we both got a good rattle out of that. He still treated us with respect, even though he knew we had been fucking with him as it could not have been his skills!
Instantly we knew our new home was going to be just fine or so we thought.
After a while he stood us upright against a wooden fence. He stood in front of us and his white teeth sparkled in the hot NZ summer’s sun, the first major hatch of tussock cicadas chirped in the nearby long unkept grass, he smiled happily away his large brown Scottish eyes studied our beautiful sexy looks. Suddenly he stopped smiling and looked left and right making sure no one was nearby.
He reach down and picked us both up with one hand and again had a quick look round, with no one around to witness anything, he ran his hands again over our smooth cork handles and craned his neck downwards and sniffed our corks, running his nose all the way up them, sucking in every scent up his flared nostrils, like someone doing a long line of cocaine through a $20 dollar bill. He smiled yet again, after his butt sniffing satisfaction as he welcomed us both into his world. Apparently many humans do this sort of sniff test when they get something new as well as when they fart or take smelly socks off.
This was the early days and what an adventure we were about to embark on for the next few years with our new owner in the pursuit of small and huge fish.
If you wish to hear more of our Hot Torpedo adventures, let me know and when I get taken out of my old black Sage TCR rod bag and find the time, I promise you that I will drop you a line!
Happy casting folks!
Love HT Betty & MM xx