About this time every year I decide upon one piece of gear or another that simply must be mine if I’m ever again going to fish effectively. It’s absurd, I know, but there’s no getting around it. For much the same reason I’m still tying flies when I’ve already got a good dozen boxes stuffed with perfectly acceptable offerings, I continue to buy angling equipment long after the word need has been forcibly removed from my vocabulary.

I’m serious—I’m not allowed to use the word, not at home, not in relation to fly fishing. And yet, as I page through the editors’ choice awards later in this issue, I can think of no suitable substitute.

Topping the list this year is the gold medal-winning Scott seven-weight. Now, I have a six-weight and more than one eight, but anyone who’s ever had the slightest brush with an obsessive-compulsive can recognize that between the two lies a yawning divide, one that simply must be filled. There’s more. This is a ten-footer. Most of my rods are either nine or nine and a half feet in length, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to nymph for steelhead this October with such a self-imposed handicap. Of course, the other options, using the same rods that somehow got me through every other season or perhaps just swinging the fly, became impossibilities the moment I first cast the Scott S3.

I’ve casually mentioned this interest in a new rod to my wife. In fact, fearing for my safety after some rather cheeky price misrepresentations were uncovered in the form of receipts from the local fly shop, I mentioned it at the most casual moment possible. Still, she wasn’t buyin’, and apparently, won’t be.

Will that be enough to dim my interest, perhaps moving the less expensive—and given the size of my rod collection, more practical—William Joseph Big Fishing Duffel to the top of the list? Absolutely not (but now that I think about it, I will be needing that duffel, too).

In all honesty, Alaska is probably not the place for taking a Luddite’s appraisal of your angling needs. If you’re going to do much fishing at all in the state, it’s actually more economical to buy the best equipment you can afford right at the start, rather than purchase the same discounted items every year. With some things, you’d probably be lucky to even make it a year. Once, while fishing for Chinook on Montana Creek, I watched an angler pull the sticker off one of those all-in-one king salmon outfits, make his first cast, and promptly hook into the largest fish I’ve ever seen in that stream. In seconds, everyone within a few hundred yards heard the gears of his reel give out, sounding something like it might if you shoved your transmission into Park while doing ninety. When the big king ran out of line to take and popped the leader, the unlucky bargain shopper let loose with such a stream of Ojibwayian profanity that I’m quite certain Hemingway himself would have blushed. Judging from the number of heads that turned to watch the poor guy stare blankly into the water, his impressive cursing display had carried much farther than last gasps of his kaput reel.

Nearly as loud was the man standing next to me (who, it must be noted, hadn’t so much as grazed a fish all day). “Exhibit number one,” he howled. “That’s why you don’t buy your king salmon gear at K-Mart.”

I admit to chuckling, but at the same time, I was heartily disappointed, primarily because my wife wasn’t there to witness it. Surely, in the right hands, such a scene could be parlayed into a whole shopping basket of new gear.

But getting back to the point at hand, the reality is there is nothing we can do to prevent the eventual destruction of our equipment. Even the best rods can break, just like the best waders will one day leak. Upgrading might not be essential, but replacement is, which is why Fish Alaska publishes an entire issue devoted to gear on an annual basis and not just once every few years. We get to highlight the newest items, many of which seem so obvious it’s a wonder we ever got by without them in the first place. We also feature our favorites from the season just past, both the best products and the best values we could find. The result, we hope, is an always up-to-date list of equipment proven to be effective in the Great Land, that most singular of angling destinations. Where only a new ten-foot rod will do.

—Troy Letherman

Editor