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Gary Loomis, you remember him? One of the guys who shaped the market of fly rods. Well, Gary, who’s coming back from a long way, is well alive, and boy he’s kicking. With NFC, his company, he won respect on the battlefields of US lure fishing. His blanks put stars in the eyes of countless rod builders, and some of them are now reference designs for those applications. I took a guilty pleasure taking heavy seabass 20m deep down the Atlantic with those carbon antennae. You should see the smile it puts on your face when an angry 30 inchers gets on the line.

But we’re not here to talk about lures. Up to now, the fly section at NFC was somewhat a turn off. That’s why most of you probably never saw a NFC fly rod. But that was before. Just a couple days ago, I received a blank from the first batches of their new carbon. I’ve built it, it’s in test and I’ll tell you what soon. It’s promising. But now this: yesterday night Gary issued that fly rod UFO: a LINEN FIBRE FLY BLANK. Yeah, you heard me.

To say the least, the thing is beautiful. It reminds me of the times when rods were made of Hickory. It seems that linen is a clean material, and that would be really nice. Now the marketing dpt says: glass feeling with carbon recovery and massive dampening of tip rebound. I say: wow. Of course it’s marketing. But it’s also Gary Loomis. If the guy did not sell his soul to the demons of capital, it may well be that the usual triptych bamboo / glass / carbon is just about to meet the new kid in the block…

I’ll fight my way to get a shot at it, and we’ll tell you what. Meanwhile, if novelty arouses you, there’s a kickstarter to get in: