This year I’ve been spending a bit of time with the Vision Glass Streamer 7ft 6in 6wt rod, assigning it the very specific role of firing small streamers into nooks and crannies in tiny brooks here in Somerset.

Admittedly, for the vast majority of my streamer fishing this season, I’ve been using either 10ft 5wt or (arguably even more specialist, yet weirdly super-versatile) 10ft 6in 3wt Helios 3’s from Orvis…

… but some of my real close-to-home water is so narrow and tunnelled with trees that neither of those long rods will physically fit, and temporarily splitting them down into sections, Neil Patterson style, tends to raise fatal doubts when there’s always a chance of striking into something out of all proportion to the diminutive size of the stream.

So, what of the Glass Streamer? As I mostly expected from fibreglass, even six-inch fish will bend it into quite a satisfying curve, and I’m looking forward to finding some of the real lunkers in 2025.

Vision’s own recommendation seems to be for using the Glass Streamer on ‘smaller to medium size rivers’, though I still can’t quite imagine loading it up with a full WF6 line and corresponding leader (perhaps that’ll come later). But it’s been good fun flicking a kind of euro-nymphing / mono rig set up, which is often all you need at small stream ranges with a fly that’s just weighted enough to carry itself to the target, towing line behind it like a harpoon.

(I think I saw ‘Elliezium’ using her Glass Streamer in mayfly time, so that might be another excuse to bring it out?)

Other points: I love the vivid lime green colour, and I’m still conflicted on the unconventional two-piece blank: quick and easy to set up, yet not quite optimised for travel.

And… confession time… my inner design freak tackle tart absolutely yearns for colourful agate in that bare chrome stripping ring. But maybe that’s for when I slip further down the glassy slope and commission something custom built and crazy beautiful from Sandy Nelson or Warren McCarthy… stranger things could happen!

The kind of fish-imitating flies known as streamers have fascinated me for what feels like forever – maybe ever since I was sitting in my high chair at my parents’ kitchen table looking at the pictures in 1970s LL Bean mail order catalogues, which I now suspect were full of classic Maine-style streamer patterns like Carrie Stevens’s Gray Ghost.

Forty-something years later, streamers still aren’t universally accepted on this side of the Big Pond, mostly because of the Victorian values that continue to hang around British fly-fishing culture – but where the rules (or lack of them) have permitted, these flies have given me some of the best moments of my fishing life so far. My very first trout from the Wandle, for example, was lured by a little black Clouser Minnow, while a similar pattern swung downstream into the tunnel under Manchester airport’s runway helped me make this one of the most iconic locations of Trout in Dirty Places. I’ve also managed to save more than one trip to the Alps with big bunny streamers in dirty or rising water.

Over the years, I’ve fished streamers on a lot of different rods (some of them quite unsuitable, but unavoidable under particular circumstances) and I’ve come to understand that a good streamer rod is a bit of a unicorn. Ideally, it needs to be powerful enough to throw a heavily weight-forward line and reasonably large fly without collapsing, yet light enough that you don’t feel you’re swinging a club all day: fast and accurate, to hit small targets and impart fish-grabbing movement to the fly, yet sensitive enough to feel delicate takes (not all streamers get eaten with a classic smash-and-grab) and even do backup service as a dry fly or nymphing rod in an emergency.

Add to all that my own particular preference for 10-foot rods on almost any water, and yes, I think that’s a unicorn I’m hunting for.

In 2015, soon after George Daniel published his American streamer bible Strip-Set, I got in touch with him to compare notes and ask which rods he rated, and banked the valuable intel that he preferred the Orvis Helios 2 in a 10-foot 5-weight. After that, I finished teaching myself all the lessons I’ve mentioned above, with a range of other different rods from 2- to 6-weights, and by the time I looked seriously at the question again, Orvis had launched the Helios 3.

Accurate from anywhere, they said.

A rifle in a world of muskets, they said.

Strategically reinforced blank, using materials otherwise reserved for military helicopter blades, producing reduced horizontal and vertical tip vibration, less swing weight, fewer casting variables, and it’s all been tested on a custom-built robotic casting rig, they said.

OK, that’s got my attention. (As did this).

So, for the last few weeks, with huge thanks to the Orvis marketing team, I’ve been test-driving the Helios 3F in the 10-foot 5-weight configuration. It’s travelled with me nearly everywhere, from West Country rivers to Highland lochs in the far north of Scotland, and it really does seem to keep the promise of the copy in the catalogue.

From rivers to lochs, the H3 has felt just as comfortable firing a tight loop of line under branches 30 feet away, to lure a big wild brown out of her bankside eddy with a 3-inch beadhead streamer, as hammering 90 (well, maybe 80) foot casts into the teeth of a gale on Loch Veyatie, and detecting the tug of a 12-inch baby ferox a couple of feet under rolling waves. With all the other streamer rods I’ve been using so far, I suspect I might have struggled to get near those fish.

Mainly I’ve matched the H3 with an aggressively-tapered Sunray El Guapo full-floating line, and a range of Airflo polyleaders: shorter and heavier for rivers, longer and lighter for lochs and other stillwaters. For throwing much bigger streamers on a regular basis, you might want to go up a couple of line weights, but I’m as confident that I can be that the super-stable tip and lower-blank strength of this 10-foot 5-weight make it fully capable of handling the vast majority of streamer fishing for trout in the UK.

The H3’s cosmetics are said to be based on snowsports, golf or mountain biking hardware, and one or two of my fishing pals have seen the photos and asked sarcastically when I joined the ‘White Stripes’ – apparently the nickname for H3 aficionados because of the striking white flash on the rod’s blank, just about the handle. To begin with, I didn’t quite know what to make of this design decision, either, but experience suggests that it really doesn’t matter: the H3’s technical performance means your attention is all out there, at the end of your line, totally focused on where your fly is working in the water. The rest of the rod is finished in a much stealthier matte grey, but if you find that white flash really bothering you, you can always cover it with joint tape. (For what it’s worth, I haven’t noticed any fish-spooking effect so far – perhaps because of the operating ranges for streamer work – and in Scotland the splash of white actually made the H3 easier to find where I’d temporarily left it in the rocks and heather in favour of a lighter dry fly rig).

Somebody, maybe even another reviewer of the H3, has said that the mark of a great rod is that you can forget you’re using it – the rod just does what you tell it to do, even when that’s pretty unrealistic. By that measure alone, as I’d hoped, this feels like a standout streamer rod for UK waters, accurate and powerful enough to boss a medium-sized streamer on an aggressively-tapered fly line, and handle big wild river trout up to 3lbs+ with some authority – yet sensitive enough to suggest what the streamer is doing even when I can’t see it, and make it fun to catch trout of almost any size. It puts a smile on my face and makes me keener than ever to fish the streamers that fascinate me, and I can’t reasonably ask for more than that.

Finally, I think this is the unicorn I’ve been hunting for. Now I’m just going to have to work out how to get it into my stable on a permanent basis…

Autumn can be one of the best times of the fishing year. But it’s all too precious and fleeting, so how can we really make the most of it?

Friends who’ve fished with me in recent years will know that when I’m on the water in the shoulder seasons, I’m increasingly likely to reach for either dry flies or streamers. I’ll happily fish nymphs, of course, but I like the conscious gear change between the other two techniques – both involve hunting the fish, but reading the water in very different ways.

This means I’ve really enjoyed writing a couple of recent features for Fishtec – one on fishing dry flies at this time of year, and the other on streamers (in a stillwater flavour). If you’ve not seen them already, please do click on the links below:

• Dry or die! Floating flies for September trout
• Top tips for fry feeders

As I’ve recently been agreeing with my fishing pals, there’s nothing like this time of year, especially because we all know winter is coming. Get out there and fish while you can!

Even if you only believe some of the stuff you read in the fly-fishing niche-within-a-niche of the internet, you’ll probably have picked up hints that Airflo fly-lines have suffered from a pretty mixed reputation. Sinkers like the Di7 are still legendary for their efficiency in plumbing the depths of the great Midlands reservoirs, but the brand’s floating lines used to be equally notorious for their memory and tendency to form permanent coils around the largest arbor reel: good for nothing but tying up tomato plants was the general web-users’ verdict.

As a long-time lounger in online coffee-houses like the Fly Fishing Forums, I took due note of these opinions… but recently I started to notice a countervailing trend. According to posts on the Spey Pages and other forums based way out west on the PNW’s steelhead coast, Airflo’s scandi- and skagit-style lines have recently achieved what can only be described as cult status. So when I found myself faced with the problem of lining up a (frankly ultralight) switch rod with something to throw big streamers into post-industrial rivers, it seemed logical to start talking to a company based on this side of the Pond…

Here in the UK, Airflo lines are marketed by the Fishtec fly-fishing tackle retail business, so I had a good look around their website before picking up the phone. Slightly to my surprise the switchboard quickly volunteered to put me through to the buying office, where it transpired that Gareth fishes exactly the same Beulah Classic 4/5 weight rig, and recommended a 270-grain Scandi Compact shooting head from his own experience of using it to hunt monster marmorati in Slovenia.

Several months later, and even having replicated his reassuringly memory-free combination of shooting head, running line and polyleaders, I still can’t claim I’m close to grooving the moves that define a spey-casting jedi master. Somewhat less running line heads for the horizon than I’d like, there’s the lurking suspicion that a comparatively little ten and a half footer probably isn’t the ideal light-sabre to practice those strokes with, and I’ve already accepted that I may have to go considerably longer and heavier for future huchen, taimen, inconnu and even our native pike. But I’ve also confirmed that yes, there really is something addictively beautiful and satisfying about double-handing a long rod of any description. And it certainly exorcised a whole cackle of demons to be able to pick up the phone to a mail order company and find my problem solved with an instant personal recommendation from an expert NPD team right here in the UK.

All of which is also a roundabout way of saying I’m delighted that this blog and my other online hangout at urbantrout.net have since (entirely unconnectedly) been chosen for listing in Fishtec’s highly respected roundup of fly-fishing blogs to be reckoned with. So thanks again, Fishtec and Airflo. Now, stand clear while I wind up this bad boy on the end of my corkscrew oozlum skagitated snap-t…