Thanks everyone for the replies. As there isn't any place locally I could cast the Winston, so I went and tried out a few Sage's today at a local dealer and ended up coming home with a Sage VXP 9' 5 weight. I got to cast it in the shop's parking lot and really liked it. A few minutes later I got to cast it on my home stream and loved it. It's not nearly as fast as my pre-concieved notions of a Sage rod were. I found it actually cast very nice in close at ranges of 20-25 feet and it casts pretty nice out to 50-60 feet too (no, the stream isn't nearly one requiring 60 foot casts, but I couldn't resist I'm quite happy with my new rod and happy that it was quite a few dollars less than the Winston I was considering. Now I can afford to look at reels too........