Quote Originally Posted by sagefisher View Post
Hackler,

I called St. Croix. They do most of their testing with Scientific Angler Mastery Series. If you want to overline your rod they suggest only going up one size, to 6 wt. Some lines are 1/2 extra and that is also ok.

Personally, I would use the Rio Grand 5 wt since it is designed a half weight heavier, or my favorite the Rio Gold fly line.

Larry ---sagefisher---
Larry (and Hackler) -

The "old" Rio Grand was my favorite line for years, and I have many of them. I liked them much better than the Mastery GPX from SA, but unfortunately Rio has changed the weighting on the Grands. They used to be a half weight heavier, which was great for faster rods. Now they've changed it to a full line weight heavier, which I think is ridiculous. Obviously, weighting up by a half weight is difficult to do under normal circumstances, making lines like the old-design Grand and the GPX very beneficial. By contrast, going up a full weight is easy to do. While you might need to make some decisions in terms of tapers, if you wanted a 6 weight for your 5 weight, you'd just, gee, let me see, buy a 6 weight line. I fail to see the novel benefit of buying a 5 weight Rio Grand now in order to get the grain weight of a 6 weight, which I can obviously do by any number of other means. When it was the grain weight of a 5 1/2 weight, that was a much different (and better, in my opinion) story. Maybe somebody with knowledge of the logic can convince me otherwise, but I think the new weighting is idiotic.