Articles

G. Loomis intros the NRX+

After almost a decade, Loomis has introduced the successor to the wildly popular NRX series
Photo: G. Loomis

The G. Loomis NRX, first announced in 2010, is one of the most heralded fly rods of all time. That first year, G. Loomis sold more NRX rods than any prior rod debut. The NRX was Loomis' successor to the also wildly popular GLX, leaving it with big shoes to fill. But fill them it did, and for almost a decade, while some other rod makers churned out one new flagship fly rod after another, the NRX remained among—if not squarely atop—the pantheon of high-performance fly rods.

Hard heads for dry flies

How a resin finish can help you get more out of your dry flies
Photo: Chris Hunt

I’ve always been something of a ham-handed fly tier, and, generally speaking, the bigger the fly, the easier it is for me to tie. I’m a big guy at six-foot-five, and my hands correspond to my height. They just aren’t meant for detail work.

A collector of memories

Being agreeable to an idea is not the same as being enthusiastic about it.
Photo: Tom Davis

One day last fall my wife, Joan, innocently suggested that since we weren’t using the old welded-wire dog crate in the garage—I think she referred to it as “that dog thing”—maybe we could put it out on the curb as a giveaway. We’d done that with the crate’s twin a couple of years ago and it was gone the same afternoon. It’s not as if people cruise our neighborhood night and day looking for stuff to pick up but if you put anything of potential value or utility next to the street it tends not to stay there long. It’s a little mysterious how it happens.

The grouse and woodcock canon

Exploring its rich literary tradition
Photo: James Vincent Wardhaugh / cc2.0.

I’ve often wondered why grouse and woodcock hunting has such a rich literary tradition. The easy explanation, I suppose, is because it’s intrinsically more poetic than other “shooting sports,” bearing much the same relationship to them that fly-fishing for trout and salmon bears to other styles of angling. The literature of trout and salmon fishing, of course, absolutely dwarfs that of all other forms of the sport, and while the separation may not be quite as great between grouse and woodcock writing and all the rest the margin is still pretty substantial.

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