For years, Redington has been offering some of the most attractively priced fully machined aluminum reels on the market. The Washington-based brand has had a number of previous successes in this arena, most recently with multiple iterations of its well-loved RISE reels and its big game-stopping GRANDE series.

Its latest offering, the all-new ACE fly reels, seems to be the successor to the aforementioned, do-it-all RISE series — promising a host of improvements over its predecessor.

In recent years, fly fishers have become increasingly interested in targeting atypical sportfish. It wasn’t that long ago that species like carp, gar, and bowfin were considered trash fish. To today’s new generation of anglers, they are considered worthy or even prized gamefish. My 13-year-old son is part of this generation, and while he enjoys trout fishing, he craves catching large fish that are willing to eat his lure or fly. To him and a growing number of anglers, there’s no stance to take between stripes and spots.