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When you're hooking into a fish once every thousand casts, you'd better be casting a rod that puts a smile on your face--otherwise, the constant rain, swift currents, and general lack of fish will probably chase you back to your car. In the same way you are constantly refining fly patterns and experimenting with different spey lines and shooting heads, Sage and its team of steelhead bums (aka R&D team) are constantly refining rod tapers and experimenting with different graphite-to-resin ratios to create a better casting rod. The newest offering from Sage's Bainbridge, Washington facility is the X Rod Spey Fly Rod, which just happens to be the tenth major fly rod series the company has released since its founding back in 1980. Sage isn't really known for making slow-action rods, and the X Rod is not exception. Building off the success of the One and its Konnetic technology, Sage increased the density of the fiber composite used on the One to create a rod that's lighter, stonger, and stiffer than either the One or Z-Axis. The high-density fiber positioning, increased composite modulus, and optimized graphite-to-resin ratios of the X Rod's Konnetic HD blank sounds pretty high tech, and, hell, you might even sound like you know what you're talking about if you throw a few of those words around at your local fly shop--but at the end of the day, the rod you're casting had better be able to cast a fly or it isn't worth a whole lot more than that spinning rod that you used to dangle a worm from when you were a kid. The increased strength and stiffness of the X Rod translates to more power, enhanced energy transfer, and better recovery times, which ultimately leads to minimal wobbling, reduced vibrations, and a crisp tip stop, so you're able to form tighter loops and deliver a fly with precision across the kind of big rivers steelhead have migrated up for generations.