Choosing a fly rod is one of those decisions that sounds simple until you actually have to make it.

Action, length, weight, species, water type. Suddenly there are dozens of variables and most anglers are left guessing on how to put it all together.

Today's conversation is about slowing that process down and making sense of it one decision at a time.

Gary Davis is the founder of San Juan Rod Works, a rod company that started in the ground slowing that process down and making sense of it one decision at a time.

Gary Davis is the founder of San Juan Rod Works, a rod company that started in the garage and has grown into a full operation with a new showroom and education-focused space in New Mexico.

Gary's background spans fly fishing, golf instruction, and that mix shows up clearly in how he thinks about rods as the tool that should match the anglers tempo water and goals. This is the wetfly swing podcast where I show you the best

places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for

that big trip and what you can do to give back to the fish species we all love. In this episode,

we walked through how to actually choose a fly rod without over-complicating things,

why action matters more than marketing terms, and how thinking about species, flies,

and casting styles leads to better decisions.

Whether you're buying your first rod or if it's filling out the quiver,

this is going to be a good discussion today and I

think you're going to love it. So right, let's get into it. Here we go. Gary Davis, you can find

him at San Juan Rodworks.com. How you doing, Gary? Doing great. Dave. Thanks for having me back on.

Looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, yeah. I think we're going to get a nice little update on what you have going. We were just talking off air on some big stuff you have coming up. We can talk about it. You've got a new place where you've moved into a bigger place. You've got a, you know, kind of a showroom slash educational center, which we're going to talk about. You do a lot of good stuff with T.U. A lot of the groups, we've got another episode, I think, with Tricia that's going to be coming out soon. So we're excited to share some of that. But Sam Juan Rod Works, you're doing some good stuff out there. We've heard a lot about, you know, just your rods. And so we're going to talk more about what makes them tick and actually help somebody decide, you know, maybe what rod to choose, right? Fast, slow, medium, all the things. But give us an update. It's been, you know, this last year, you've been, so talk about the show, or maybe start there. Is that the biggest thing you've been working on? Yeah. So, you know, we've been extremely fortunate.

You know, I started the company back in 2020, basically out of my garage. And we've been really,

you know, the support has been incredible. We've really grown tremendously over the last three years

in particular to the point where it's like, all right, this has to move out of the house.

So, so, but I was really looking for something, you know, I didn't really want a retail space.

I really wanted something that was more of a showroom that had an element of it where, you know,

we could start to do some things with the community.

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