Thanks largely to my bout with the death flu, it's been two weeks since I last fished. (Ever notice that many fishing reports begin on the note of a confessional?)

I had an itch to fish, a fly rod to test, and a strong desire to get the hell out of the house. I also had some lingering effects of the flu, a monster lack of energy, and -- after sitting down and resting halfway through the Wonderdog's morning walk -- sad knowledge of my limits.

In other words, no death hikes.

So Dave Edmondson and I threw the float tubes into the truck and headed to water I'd technically classify as "slumming." It's a pretty alpine lake that's shallow and weedy and could be a fabulous fish factory.

Sadly, it's stocked to within an inch of its life, and because you can drive there, it's overrun with campers, boom boxes, screaming, rock-throwing kids, barking dogs -- the whole human catastrophe.

Still, I'm in the process of field-testing a fly rod foolishly sent to me by Orvis, and the lake is carpeted with lily pads, and the smart fly fisher picks apart the spaces between the pads.

Lilly pads. Good for trout -- and fly rod testing.

That's a good testing ground for a fly rod; you cast long, you cast short, and you cast for accuracy. What you hope doesn't happen is that you cast fruitlessly. Sadly by dark (we only fished a little more than an hour), I had four grabs but managed to land no fish.

"What's that smell" you say? Yes, we're talking about the fast-approaching smell of skunk.

Fortunately, only a minute away from the Float Tube Landing Zone, I hooked up with a small trout. I stripped him in, netted him, the hook fell out, I fired one round from the camera (it was dark, and they just never turn out), and assumed I'd just caught and released a rainbow trout.

The Miracle Trout

Sure, catching a trout only seconds before the evening's over isn't wholly unusual, but when that fish is a rainbow trout at night but becomes a Brook trout (the Official Char of the Trout Underground
) in the blurry photograph the next morning, then damnit, we're talking divine intervention .

The Miracle Trout? Call the Weekly World News...

One little stocker is pretty much like another, but I didn't know they stocked Brookies in this lake, which -- if you go there on a weekend -- is clearly a put and take fishery. In view of the recent Immaculate Brookie Transformation, I'm heading back -- I just know there's a clump of lily pads there that look just like the pope. I knowit.

The Test Rod

As one of the few tackle companies who realizes that blogs exist, Orvis has pumped out a few early samples of their new Helios fly rod line to bloggers like MidCurrent and FFlogger.

I give 'em props for sending one to me too, especially given that I'm a largely low-modulus guy in a high modulus fly rod world. There's some risk in that.

Orvis foolishly sent a rod to me for testing. At least now we know it's durable.

I'll pen a larger review soon. First impressions are that if a light rod is what turns you on, then you'll be taking a hard look at the Helios line. According to Orvis, they're 25% lighter than their Zero Gravity rods (sure, we wonder how anything could be lighter than "Zero Gravity" but then, marketing has never obeyed the same laws the physical universe), and they're probably not kidding about that.

When I pulled the tube out of the shipping box, I was pretty sure it was empty. Sent for testing was the 8.5' 5wt "mid flex" rod - a sample rod so preliminary that "Helios" wasn't even stenciled on the thing.

I'll do the full monty in a bit, but suffice it to say that the rod is damned accurate, and that it's quite sweet at reasonable trout ranges.

One of the glaring weaknesses of the high modulus "parking lot" rods that have flooded the market in the last decade is the utter lack of feedback and feel. The Helios does a nice job of avoiding the high modulus "dead zone." (If it didn't I would have just sent the thing back without a word). More to come.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

fly fishing, fishing, orvis, helios, fly rod, brook trout