Too sexy for your loops?

“I was teaching and doing casting demonstrations with the Hot Torpedo this weekend. Several of my friends wanted to cast it, because it is so unusual looking.

They did have a few questions that I could not answer – What is the action? Everyone had a different opinion. Fiberglass, graphite or a hybrid? Where was it built? Mailed from England, designed in Indonesia, hand rolled wraps or Chinese sourced? I don’t need to know any secrets.

The more I cast the rod – the more I like it”

Great questions!

The Sexyloops HTs are carbon fibre / graphite. In the case of HTs there are three – sometimes four – different types of carbon fibre cloths combined in every section. How to describe an action? “Fast with feel”? “Progressively Fast”? “Sexy”? I’ve no idea how to describe an action meaningfully. It progressively bends and you will feel that, which I think is a good thing, and how a rod should behave. It recovers very quickly and damps exceptionally well.

The rods are designed through me working with a Spanish blank manufacturer. The carbon cloth is Japanese, which is where most of the stuff comes from. I have a good friend in Asturias – Alejandro – who I met back in yr2000. He was one of the CNL instructors examined by Mel Krieger. He and his wife were living in a deserted village surrounded by chickens at the time. A superb caster and angler. Some years after this he got the job of designing fly rods for the Spanish rod manufacturer, Maxia.

I had planned for many years to develop a Sexyloops rod range. Rod design went in a weird direction about 20 years ago and I found myself preferring the Loomis IMX, the Sage XP and the Scott Tactical over many of today’s “modern rods”. And the more “modern” rods became, the more I disliked them. It’s a bizarre trend that seems to be finally reversing.

Anyway, I figured if I really worked hard at it, then I might be able to produce rods that will see me fishing for the next 50 years, because the only real difference between rods nowadays is design. Yes the resins are better than 20 years ago and we usually lay the carbon cloth a bit differently, but the truth is that most of the marketing claims are there to make you think that there has been some miraculous new technology invented, when in fact what truly differentiates a rod is its design.

Most rods are copies of copies and I didn’t want to do that. I have to say though, in the process early on we got very lucky indeed. I’ve often said that the Big Fish is looking down on us, and when he produced the fourth HT6 prototype (which was basically a strengthened third section to prevent Stefan Siikavaara from ever breaking it again), he was in a good mood, because this latest version was the best 9’ #6 I’d ever cast. I then spent a year travelling with it, fishing, casting, casting competitions, instructor meets and events. That HT6 prototype must have been cast by well over 1000 people. Some of them, after casting it, said “I’m not going to go fishing until you produce this rod. Fly fishing without it will never be the same again”.

Now this is all quite subjective of course, but that’s absolutely fine because I am the one making the decisions! But it also created a major problem because how do we do it again? I didn’t want Sexyloops to be a “one rod wonder”. So this was really when the work truly began; trying to design rods, in different line weights, that behaved and performed like the HT6 performs… that Stefan and the Big Fish accidentally helped develop.

This has not been easy! The HT8 took 8 or 9 prototypes. I had given up on the HT4 but decided to have “one more go”. The HT5 took me 10 years and I actually had to grow a beard to make that happen.

Now a lot of companies today talk about technology but I’ve found Shamanic drumming to be useful.

So that’s how the blank appears. Communicating with Alejandro what I want and would like to change is interesting. I speak English, as you can see. Alejandro however speaks Spanish and Google English. So we do a lot of telepathic messaging.

The rods are built in the UK. I was looking for a Leonardo Da Vince type to build Sexyloops rods. And I ended up with a sort of red bearded dwarf.

There are two ways to build a rod. One is that you can build it as fast as you can. As many of you will know, we don’t do this. Why use one coat of epoxy when you can do 5 “sniffs” of epoxy? Sometimes the layers are so thin we don’t even put any epoxy on the brush. The result is the manufacturing equivalent of a truly top notch custom rod builder, because that is what Lee is... when he’s not mining rocks.

We never cut corners by trying to save pennies at the bottom end. If you are going to build arguably the finest fly rods, then you need to buy the finest components, the best quality cork and the best rod tubes. Just so you know: our Sexyloops aluminium rod tubes cost us £50 wholesale after shipping and tax (FFS). I don’t buy from China because the end caps fall off.

So that’s where we are. Incidentally every Hot Torpedo comes with a free Zoom flycasting lesson given by a Yeti in the jungle. And for the next 666 rods sold (minus what has been sold in the past couple of months) there is a chance to win a two week all-expenses paid saltwater fly fishing holiday on the Sexyloops battle-yacht.

I’ve ordered Starlink this week (satellite internet), two more solar panels and a 62Kg gel battery. I’m particularly looking forward to running down the stairs to the lake with this over my shoulder.

You can find out more about our rods here:

https://www.sexyloops.com/index.php/webshop/list/70/fly-rods

Have a great day/week.

Cheers, Paul