Product Review:
Sea Level Fly Fishing's Bluewater Extreme Fly Rods
Sea Level Fly Fishing's Bluewater Extreme fly rods are a good fit for Beyond The Breakwater fly-fishing. Here's our review...
| Introduction |  |
Basic Specs | |
A Closer Look | |
Performance Notes | |
Other Notes & Conclusions |
Slugging it out offshore
(courtesy Scott Jaunich)
Bluewater fly-fishing usually involves brief periods of short- to-moderate distance casting with sinking lines. Pinpoint accuracy is not required.
Once a fish is hooked up, there will probably be a lot of heavy lifting, much of it with the fish directly below the boat. Pumping a fish up may be a prolonged game of gaining or losing inches of line with the leader stretched almost to the breaking point. While tippet strength is limited by the IGFA to 20lb class, many people use heavier tippets when the fish are big and/or records are not a consideration.
These conditions dictate that offshore fly rods have these characteristics:
- They need to be tough enough to handle a deep bend under heavy pressure. That includes being able to handle an occasional high-stick move without blowing up.
- They have to retain enough power in the butt to allow you to pull on the fish without fear of breaking the rod.
- Reel seats need to be sturdy enough to keep large reels in place with 5-7lbs+ of drag.
- Guides need to be large enough to allow minor tangles in the running line to pass through without incident, be heavily secured so that they don’t move under pressure, and be able to protect fly line coatings from damage when using heavy tippets.
- Rod grips need to be non-slip, and firm enough to allow the angler to control casting a heavy rod.
- A properly sized and placed foregrip can be a big help, especially during long fights with heavy tippets.
- Rod weight is not a big concern, because there’s not a lot of casting involved. In most cases, trading off rod durability and power for a few ounces in weight is well worth it.
- Along similar lines, trading off the casting ability of a longer rod for the fish-fighting capabilities of a shorter rod is also a reasonable choice.
How Do the Bluewater Extremes Stack Up?
Overall, they are a very good match.
The guides used on the Extreme series are all large and securely wrapped. The wraps are well done, with no gaps in the windings. The detailed threadwork in the contrasting trim is outstanding for rods is this price range, and they’re finished with a high-gloss polymer coating.
The Extremes’ graphite reel seats are a good choice for offshore fly rods. They are tough as nails, provide secure attachment, and the hoods are large enough to accommodate any size fly reel foot. Another plus is that the lock nut and thread design resists jamming from dried salt crystals and dirt. Some people don’t care for the utilitarian look of graphite reel seats, but they're very functional.
The reel seats are up-locking on the 10 and 12 weight Extremes (i.e., the fixed hood of the reel seat is closer to the grip, and the lock nut pushes the movable hood up towards the grip), but on the 14wt and 16wt models they are down-locking. That’s because the 14wt and 16wt rods have gimbal butts, and in order to comply with IGFA rules for extension butt length on fly rods (no more than 6” from the middle of reel foot to the end of the extension butt), the reel seats had to be reversed.
The gimbal butts on the 14wt and 16wt Extremes feature a unique swivel mechanism. To understand why fly-fishermen might want this unique feature, you have to understand what happens when a rod with a gimbal butt is used with a matching rod belt (one with a crossbar in the bottom of the cup).
Gimbal butts are seen most often on heavy conventional (rotating spool) outfits. Conventional outfits have the reel sitting on top of the rod. These reels are heavy, and when there is a lot of drag pressure, there is a strong tendency for the rod to turn turtle, with the reel winding up underneath the rod. It can be quite a struggle to keep the rod and reel upright, especially with heavy tackle (50lb class or more). That’s where a gimbal butt comes in.
With a regular, non-swiveling gimbal butt, once the nock in the gimbal is slipped over the fighting belt’s crossbar, the rod is forced to maintain its orientation with the reel on top. Little effort is required by the angler to keep the rig upright. The angler just has to focus on the up-and-down motions of pumping the fish. Of course, many fishermen add a shoulder or kidney harness to help with that part of the battle as well.
Gimbals also help keep the rod butt locked into the rod belt. When there is serious drag pressure at work, the butt of a rod without a gimbal can slip up out of the pocket of a rod belt, especially when the fish is directly below the boat. The gimbal and crossbar help prevent that from happening.
This latter scenario is why gimbal butts are often included on heavy offshore fly rods. But as noted, a fly rod with a regular gimbal butt will lock the fly rod and reel into a vertical plane (i.e. with the reel directly beneath the rod), only allowing it to pivot around the crossbar in a vertical plane. This is fine, as long as you only want to fight the fish with the rod moving up-and-down.
However, if you want to apply side pressure on a fish by holding the rod low and pulling sideways, the conventional gimbal becomes a handicap. Since the rod can’t rotate (the rod and reel are locked in the vertical plane by the crossbar), you’re forced to flex the rod sideways in order to get side pressure.
On the other hand, the swiveling gimbal butt used on the Extremes allows you to rotate the rod without disengaging the gimbal from the crossbar. When you want to apply side pressure, you can turn the grip to rotate the rod before you pull sideways. By doing this, you will be able to pull with the rod along a plane aligned with the spine of the rod and the guides. This is a much better situation.
Synthetic fly rod grips have been around for a number of years, but are not widely used except on bluewater fly rods. Part of this is probably due to tradition, but early foam fly rod grips also had some issues. While they were durable and had a good non-slip surface, they typically were too heavy and too soft for fly fishermen. They did not have a good feel during the cast, and seemed to absorb some of the energy in the power stroke.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with the Extreme rods. The EVA foam grips on these rods are firm enough to give reasonable feel during the cast. While they are a bit softer than I would like, they’re entirely usable, and are clearly more durable than cork.
Like many offshore fly rods, the Extremes have foregrips. On some offshore rods, the foregrip is too small and/or located too far out on the blank. This forces the angler to high-stick the rod when fighting a fish, or to give up on the foregrip and grab the blank closer to the regular grip. That’s why we like foregrip designs that position a fairly long foregrip very close to the main grip. This allows the angler to use a variety of hand positions, depending on what the situation calls for. The Extreme foregrips fall into this category.
The Extreme series are heavy rods, noticeably heavier than some competing products. For example, the 10wt Extreme weighs in at 9.9 ounces, while competing products weigh in the neighborhood of 4.5 – 5 ounces. The 14wt tips the scale at 13 ounces, compared to some similar line weight rods which weigh 6 – 7 ounces.
That may sound like a lot of extra weight, but in practice, it’s not a problem. Since bluewater fly-fishing doesn’t require continuous casting over long periods of time, the extra weight is not really noticeable.
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