Building The Rodfather Power Pack [drc #16 9ft 5wt 6pc] 30Jan22-07Mar22

A guy's gotta build and at least one rod I didn't have was a packable 5 weight. On some alpine lake jaunts I'd really like the power in the wind, or the casting distance to reach a drop off 40 feet away, or just the nymphing reach offered in a 9' 5 weight. Sure the landing power in a 5 wt may not be often needed in the alpine, but one can hope and I will be prepared. The length of a broken down 9 footer (~28") just tends to catch trees and bushes on the hike so I usually chose something shorter and lighter. Enter the no compromises Rodfather Power Pack (RFPP), a 9' 6 piece rod breaking down to just ~18.75" but still providing the backbone and power of a 5 weight. One might think the "extra" ferrules would dull action or significantly increase weight so I sought out a premium blank available in 6 pieces and chose the dark charcoal MHX Native blank built from Mitsubishi rayon (like my Fubuki driver shaft!) ~ it's only ~1/4 ounce heavier than my lightest 4 piece 5 weight blanks yet yielded a good ERN of 5.5 and solid speed AA of 69°in just 3.8oz. It is awesome and I mated it to my Hardy ultralight CADD reel in black loaded with SA Amplitude Infinity WF5F line. Frankly this is keen feeling rod despite the extra ferrules, and is one of my favored casting 5 weights; whoa ~ I did not expect that at all.

 

 

As usual I spun out a custom handle first. The idea here was just a gradient of rings (from handle center: 1/4s, 1/2s, 3/4s, and 1s). For the reel seat I recovered nice black REC hardware with removable fighting butt feature from a prior mistake where the wooden insert had cracked. I used a heat gun to melt the epoxy holding it together then cleaned it up and bought a new matching stabilized California buckeye burl insert for the RFPP.

I marked the spline as usual and measured for guide locations; these needed to be adjusted from my normal for a fast 5 a smidge to account for when a guide would otherwise be too close to a ferrule for comfort... NP, just a spreadsheet. I chose some sweet double-footed Snake guides in chrome with ECO coating (I didn't want to go black to too much copy the RFAB rod) and a nice slick #12 Fuji stripping guide. I wrapped the dark charcoal rod out in purple with a couple of splashes of sunset for the Broncos. Nice.

The system balances well and casts dreamily as mentioned. Balance with and without the fighting butt (made that pretty light) changes basically nothing, but aids in landing bigger fish.

While I will take this rod out on a trip to my regular haunts soon, to get it some experience quickly, it is intended for the backcountry and it'll be a while till I'm fishing in the alpine.

Update 18Mar22 - The RFPP got a custom trimmed sleeve from Kala's sewing prowess and I'll carry it out to the backcountry in a custom made polystryrene case. It did end up being 22" long after sleeve, padding and caps were added - still much smaller than 4pc nine footers at 32".