Upstream Wet Fly

[Old Hat]

I still have my very first reel. It is an all aluminum LLBean real that makes a god awful clacking that spooks every fish within 50 feet but is good for keeping away the bears in Yellowstone area. I think it was made by Hardy.

[PhilA]

Do you have any other PHY rods?
John

John,
Do you know when your Perfectionist was built? And, by whom? It's not in Bob Golder's PHY database.
(http://phydatabase.com).

I'm quite a fan of Paul Young tapers. Strictly speaking, I own no other PHY rods, but I do own two other Bob Summers rods. (Summers almost certainly built my PHY Perfectionist, because it was built two years after Paul Young died, and it's signed in Summers' handwriting.)

One Summers rod is a model 275 (7'6" 2/2 supposed 4wt), which is his rendition of the Perfectionist. It is a wonderful and versatile rod. For example, the tip section of my PHY Perfectionist is very light, and the rod is not well suited for deeper nymph fishing. I fish it exclusively with dry flies. The Summers 275, however, is excellent for nymphs, wets, and dries regardless of the location in the water column. Like most other Perfectionists (and reproductions), however, the Summers 275 casts better with a 5wt line in my hand. I fish at pretty short distances here in WI, and others might line it with a 4wt for longer distance work.

The second Summers rod is his rendition of the PHY Midge. It's a 6'4" 2/2 true 4wt and is the sweetest casting rod I own. (The PHY Midge is a 6'3" 4wt.) The Summers Midge was quite a windfall. Bob Summers has for many years contributed annually a new rod in support of conservation projects on the Boardman River near Traverse City. Over a thousand raffle tickets are typically sold but, for the price of my $10 entry, I won the rod in 2003! Sometimes an angler just gets lucky.

Bob Summers' rods are immaculate and have an understated beauty that is hard to beat. Quite honestly, they are built better than many (most?) of the original Paul Young rods I've seen. That could be misleading, however, because Paul Young rods are great fishing tools. They were not bought by collectors, but rather by anglers who fished them hard for many years. Today, they are "old and gray", whereas many Summers rods are pampered as collector items. Not me ... I fish all my rods. And, if I damage one of them, so be it. That's what they were intended for, and I get great joy from fishing a great rod.

Cheers,
Phil

[Greenwell]

PHY 3.jpg (338.53 KiB) Viewed 11129 times

Phil,

A rather poor photo of my Perfectionist, for some reason I'm having problems loading pics. Anyway, I've owned it for over 30 years and never entered it in the database. The writing appears to be Bob's as I've owned several of his rods and it matched. Could also have been Todd's though, I'm no expert on PHYs. If you can tell from the photo, please let me know. BTW, the colors in the photo are not very good; the bag shows blue rather than the khaki it actually is and the grip looks washed out.........

This rod has very fine tips as well, 4/64" tip tops and the tips are book-matched. The light tips make it a perfect 4 weight. The build quality is typical Young, nice but utilitarian, which is fine with me. My idea of a good rod is one that casts well and I detest the tarted up confections one often sees today. It's part of the reason I like Leonards; good honest rods with almost Spartan aesthetics.
(Some friends and I have been searching out older light line Leonards, primarily Catskill models, the last few years and we've come across some wonderful rods.
I'm a real fan of the Model 40 Fairy Catskill, a 3 piece 8' rod that weighs between right around 3 oz. and takes a 4 weight. I have three at the moment and all are magical. Galen Mercer prefers the Model 39 Fairy Catskill at 8' and 2 1/4 oz. He's landed 21" wild fish on the West Branch Delaware with this toothpick. But that's another story........!)

Over the years I've owned several of Bob's rods, including a 275, 260, 6'4" Midge and an 856. I never found the 275 or 856 very much to my liking and sold them when the market was hot a few years back. The Midge was a nice rod but I don't really like anything shorter than 7' so it went too. The 260 I owned the longest but it ended up with a friend in partial trade for a Payne 197.

[tie2fish]

Or this ... ?

PHY 3.jpg (498.16 KiB) Viewed 11110 times

[Greenwell]

First one you fixed is better.

Thanks Bill!

[Mike62]

I still have my very first reel. It is an all aluminum LLBean real that makes a god awful clacking that spooks every fish within 50 feet but is good for keeping away the bears in Yellowstone area. I think it was made by Hardy.

I still have my first fly reel, a Bronson Royalist 370. My grandfather gave it to me when I was a kid and I thought it was the greatest reel ever made. I just pulled it out to see if it still clacked like a carnival wheel of fortune, ...it does. It never occurred to me that the wonderfully unique sounds our reels make might be considered obnoxious. I've got a Hardy I fish quite a bit; the Orvis's and the Bean's and the Martin's; I love them all.

The ones I don't care for as much, and this thread has finally made me realize why, are my three Okuma's: ...they're silent.

In High School I found a Pflueger 1534 Progress at a yard sale for something like $5. The sound that one makes is subtle, almost demure. I'm right handed but I reel left and it never occurred to me when I bought it that it couldn't be reversed. I still have it so if anybody knows a trick to changing it I'm all ears.

I tried simply turning it around and fishing it that way but I just never felt right about it.

[tie2fish]

First one you fixed is better.

Thanks Bill!

That's the one John S. fixed.

[letumgo]

Mike62 - I posted a tutorial showing how to switch the retrieve on a Pfluger reel. Not sure if it will work on yours, but it might be worth looking at the tutorial to see if the internal geometry is similar.

LINK TO TUTORIAL ---> viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7632

[PhilA]

John,
I'm not an expert on Paul Young rods either. If you want the best estimate of its builder, you might send photos to Bob Summers.

Bob Golder is probably the best expert about PHY rods other than Bob Summers. Golder is very active on Clark's Board (the CFRF), and I did some sleuthing with the CFRF search engine. The following information is either from his PHY database, Golder's CFRF posts, or Bob Summers' web site.

The serial numbers of PHY rods increased incrementally over the decades and were assigned as individual rods were finished. Paul Young was notorious, however, for skipping hundreds or even a thousand numbers occasionally. The speculation is that he did this to confuse his competitors. The serial number of your rod dates to the middle or late 1980s, pretty solidly in the Todd Young era.

The most informative landmarks of dates that I could find before and after serial #4898 are:

1. One of the very last rods finished by Bob Summers in the PHY shop is serial #4710.
2. One of the very first rods finished by Jack Young in the PHY shop is serial #4722.
3. Serial #4874 is a Martha Marie received new in May, 1984.
4. Serial #4890 is a Driggs "possibly built by Todd Young".
5. Serial #4895 is a Driggs believed by its owner to have been built by Todd Young.
(Your #4898 would be here.)
6. Serial #4916 is a Para 14 described by its owner as "a late 1980s Todd Young-era rod".
7. Serial #4966 is a Princess built by Todd Young in spring 1993.


About the handwriting on your Perfectionist...

I've cropped and edited for color temperature and clarity your photo of #4898:


Some examples of Bob Summers' handwriting:









One example of Jack Young's handwriting:



One example of Todd Young's handwriting:



There's not a lot to go on with only a single Todd Young inscription. His handwriting appears similar to Bob Summers'. The Summers' inscriptions look more cursive and flowing to me, but you can be the judge. The inking is inconclusive, but Bob Summers was well established in his own shop by the mid 1980s. Might Summers have inked or finished a Todd Young rod? I don't know, but the two shops were across town from each other.

Cheers,
Phil

[Smuggler]

Fishing small Partridge and Hare's Ear's upstream on the Firehole with Shaner is probably one of, if not the best fishing outing I've ever had. That PMD emergence followed by White Miller's was ridiculous to say the least... in the best sense of the phrase.

Spent a week in MT/WY and spent the majority of the time fishing wets upstream on the Firehole... believe me, it's a method that should be practiced and placed in everyone's repertoire. Mastering it is another story.

Someone mentioned earlier that this seems familiar to the guys who Euro Nymph... somewhat, yes.. those guys are using big shock leaders though so they can manage throwing heavy flies more effectively. Where as here, is a different game involving finesse.