Discovery from yesterdays...

It's end of december and it's that time of the year. Long dark winter evenings which are made for reading. This evening I picked out a bunch of older issues (1982/1983) of Fly Fisherman magazine.

It's nice to see what innovations we've seen since the early 1980's. Take for instance the graphite rods. The early rods were much more nimble and slower actioned rods that resembled the best fiberglass and bamboo rods that were common. Brands like Powell, Fisher and LC (Loomis Composites) were the companies that brought the best new fly rods. All three rod companies are now defunct.

Other huge improvements have been in waders and (foul weather) clothing. Most waders back then were made of rubber. Very effective but also very heavy and uncomfortable. Neoprene waders were just entering the market. Same goes for wading jackets. In fact the rain jackets we now know as wading jackets didn't exist back then. Rain jackets back then was everything that kept you dry. The wading jackets as we now know was 'invented' in 1989 by Patagonia with their SST jacket.

I like to check out the ads in the magazines. Some were on the verge of getting really big. Like the now defunct Kaufmann's Streamborn with their famous catalogs and mail order business. While others, like Leonard's bamboo fly rods, were on their way out as demand for the products diminished.

Simms, back then located in Jackson Hole Wyoming (sounds better than Bozeman Montana to me!), wasn't the big wader company we know now but they started selling fishing accessories. Sage started their journey to the current dominance in high performance fly rods.

And Orvis was big back then as it is now, maybe even bigger. Here's a nice 'discovery' I did while wandering through the magazines.

It's known that Orvis issues other companies to put an Orvis label on their product to be sold as an Orvis product. The Orvis Featherweight SSS reel is the lightweight version of their famous SSS saltwater reels, which probably didn't stay long in the catalogs.

I ran into an ad from a company called Crystal Mark who made a reel called the Stutz Estuary Reel. So it seems that this company made the Featherweight SSS reels for Orvis.

Even more interesting is that it seems that both the original Stutz Estuary Reel and the Orvis Featherweight SSS reel were sold during the same period. Here is the announcement of the Orvis Featherweight SSS in the Jan/Feb 1982 issue of Fly Fisherman magazine, while the Stutz ad was found in the December 1982 issue.

Update:
The company that made the Estuary reel asked the then unknown machinist called Steve Abel to make the Estuary reels. We all know what became of Steve Abel. Here is where I got the information.