Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
Scott Fly Rods built the world's first nine-foot four-weight graphite rod in the 1970s, after the company's founder saw that graphite could carry length without weight. That rod let anglers fish long, light leaders on technical spring creeks, and it made the nine-foot rod the industry standard it remains today.
Jim Bartschi is president and rod designer at Scott Fly Rods and chairman of the American Fly Fishing Trade Association, and has worked in fly fishing for about 40 years.
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What was the first nine-foot four-weight fly rod?
The first nine-foot four-weight was a Scott Fly Rods design, built once unidirectional graphite became commercially available in the early 1970s. Fenwick had graphite first but used it to build the same short rods the industry already made in fiberglass. Scott's founder proposed a nine-foot four-weight instead and was laughed out of the Golden Gate casting ponds for it; the finished rod let anglers fish long, light leaders on hatch-driven water like the Henry's Fork, Hat Creek and Fall River.
Why did Scott Fly Rods start with short fiberglass rods?
Scott Fly Rods began in San Francisco around 1972 and incorporated in 1974, in the fiberglass era, when the standard all-purpose rod was closer to a seven-and-a-half-foot five-weight than a nine-foot five-weight. Fiberglass was heavy enough that long rods were reserved for tournament casting and specialty saltwater or salmon work. Scott's niche was short, light-line, multi-piece rods built on a hollow internal ferrule, aimed at anglers hiking into remote streams and lakes, and Scott still builds a fiberglass series today.
Why did Scott Fly Rods move from California to Colorado?
Scott Fly Rods was based in downtown San Francisco or across the bay in Berkeley until roughly 1994, so about half the company's history is Californian. The move to Colorado was a lifestyle decision rather than a business one: fly fishing is not a get-rich profession, so putting the shop where employees can step out the door onto water was part of the compensation. The Gunnison River drainage is ten minutes away, with a tributary roughly a cast from the shop's back door.
What goes into designing a new Scott fly rod series?
There is no single breakthrough available anymore, so a new Scott series combines small gains: a step forward in resin chemistry, a new combination of fibers, a different directional layup, a taper tweak, a lighter or stronger component. The Centric came out of that process, chasing more line speed, quicker recovery and less axial wobble than the previous flagship series. Development ran for a couple of years and accelerated during the 2020 shutdown, when both the shop staff and the pro staff suddenly had time.
Why is the two-handed fly rod market so small?
Two-handed rods are the smallest category in fly fishing, well behind cold-water trout and saltwater. They are also among the most complex and expensive rods to build because they consume large amounts of costly carbon fiber. Scott's two-handed series is aimed at higher-line-speed Scandi-style casting, which is more popular in Europe than in North America, where Skagit systems dominate the West Coast. The bigger constraint is opportunity: chasing steelhead or Atlantic salmon now takes real effort to arrange.
Is saltwater or freshwater the bigger part of fly rod sales?
Freshwater trout is still the largest segment of the fly fishing industry, and the big fly line companies sell more five-weights than eight-weights. Saltwater has grown from roughly a quarter of the business and is expanding faster than freshwater, closing the gap without having reached an even split. Much of that growth came from the last 15 to 20 years of global exploration, which turned up mostly marine fisheries.
Why doesn't Scott Fly Rods make beginner fly rods?
Scott Fly Rods committed to handcrafting every rod carrying the Scott name, and every rod costs roughly the same in labor and materials to build. That sets a price floor Scott cannot go below, which means the brand does not serve beginning anglers well. In exchange, Scott has stayed a single-product company for more than four decades, making only fly rods and selling only through specialty fly shops, which lets it work on fine details rather than spreading across categories.
Key takeaways
- The nine-foot four-weight, now the industry's reference rod, was a Scott Fly Rods design and the first of its kind.
- Fiberglass-era standard rods were around seven and a half feet; long rods only became practical once graphite arrived.
- Scott's early graphite prototypes joined sections with brass cane ferrules before the hollow internal ferrule was adapted to graphite.
- New rod series now advance through combined small gains in resin, fiber mix, layup and components, not one material breakthrough.
- Two-handed rods are the smallest fly rod category and the most carbon-fiber-intensive to build, which keeps them expensive.
- Handcrafting every rod sets a price floor, so Scott targets dedicated anglers rather than entry-level buyers.
