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 Back to: Angler's West Flyfishing Scott X2S: Limitless Performance
New for 2007, Scott Fly Rods has introduced a series of saltwater rods that have quickly become all the rage this winter. From the ground up, these rods are awesome. And at a very reasonable price of $575 for the 6-9 wt and $595 for 10-12 wts, you get a lot of performance for your money. But why are we, a specialty flyshop centered in the golden triangle of trout fishing, reviewing a saltwater rod? Read on! After hearing about how versatile this new series was and how well it had been received by our saltwater brethren shortly after late last summer's unveiling , Sean and I got a chance to play with several 8 and 9 weights at the Fly Fishing Retailer Show in Denver. And at the suggestion of our Scott rep, John Dobson, we asked the folks at Scott to send us one of the X2s rods in a 6 weight, the lightest line weight in this series with the thought of testing one out for fall streamer fishing on the Yellowstone. Have we been pleasantly surprised! Here are the results. The first thing you notice is that these rods are a thing of beauty right out of the tube. A deep almost Prussian blue color with matching thread wraps and silver thread highlights complement the natural finish. Why natural finish? Natural finish blanks let Scott precisely control the amount of graphite fiber and resin in each blank and creates a rod with great touch, durability, and feel. The rods componetry is top notch coming with a UV clear coating for protection, a fine Portugese hand sanded full Wells grip with machined 6061-T6 all aluminum anodized titanium colored up-locking reel seat, a fixed 1-inch cork and rubber fighting butt, oversized SiC stripping guides, and high quality super hard chrome snake guides. As with all top performing Scott rods, the X2S comes with its own American made cloth rod sock and aluminum rod tube as well as Scott’s unconditional guarantee. Most important, would we want to continue to fish this rod day in day out under the circumstances we encountered? Absolutely! We can’t wait for the opportunity to fish this rod this summer during the Salmonfly hatch as well as fishing big dry hopper patterns. With the rod characteristics we encountered last fall, the X2s is bound to excel at fishing big, bushy dry flies and handle windy days like a champ. The 6 wt X2s is destined to become the hottest selling “Big Gun” for 2007. Contact the Flyshop about the new X2s rods. |
By: Matson Rogers 
Getting beyond the cosmetics, this is what we found: a real workhorse of a rod at an excellent value. The X2S features a sleeve over ferrule design on a sports car fast rod blank. The tip section is light and lively giving the caster a low “swing weight” while also allowing for quick loading of the rod. Why are these features important? A low swing weight and fast loading rod tip allow for very quick, short and extremely accurate casts while maintaining a high degree of line speed. A majority of our testing was with fairly heavily weighted fall streamer patterns while casting well under 60 feet in total length. Yet, the rod has a ton of backbone! We did strip an entire WF floating 7 wt line off a reel and had no problem shooting the entire 90 plus feet on a Yellowstone fall day (read that to include the forever present Paradise Valley “breeze”). Hmmm, a 7 line you say. Yes, in our tests, we fished both a WF floating 6, a WF floating 7, and a 200 grain Streamer Express shooting head. The fast action nature of this rod lends itself to easily “upsizing” one line weight while fishing the weight forward (WF) floating lines. And it handled the 200 grain shooting head without any problems whatsoever. In fact, with a moderately competent angler, the 6 wt we tested can handle a 250 grain head without much struggle.