The Anglers All team recently had the opportunity to spend time chatting with Orvis director of product design and development, Shawn Combs. As the lead fly rod designer for Orvis, we were curious to pick Shawn’s brain about the new Helios fly rods.
Having spent some time casting and fishing with the new flagship rods from Orvis, there’s no doubt they’re impressive. Boasting four-times more accuracy, 25% stronger, and 10% lighter swing weight than its predecessor, the Helios 3, speaking with Shawn gave us a chance to dig into the technology and the testing that brought the Orvis design team to this point.
Shawn has been with Orvis for 13 years, and his first rod project there was the Helios 2. The H2 was released in 2012, about four years after the first generation. Then in 2017, Shawn and his team released the Helios 3, which is still considered one of the industry’s top premium fly rods.
“This time, it’s just called Helios,” Shawn told us. “It’s not H4 or anything like that. What’s important to us is that if you bump into a friend on the river, whether they’re a new angler or the grittiest old guide, and whether you’re fishing an H2, H3 or whatever, all that you need to know is that it’s a Helios. Just Helios.”
Now 50 years after Orvis introduced their first graphite rod, and still just a stone’s throw from where the company began building rods more than 160 years ago, Orvis has created its fourth generation of Helios fly rods – and it appears they’ve outdone themselves.
“Before you ask, there’s still no hook keeper on freshwater rods,” Shawn began our conversation with a big grin. “I’m so sorry. But my therapist says that we can get through this together. On saltwater rods, we’ve been using stripping guides as hook keepers for a while. So there, I said it. Now we can move on to the important stuff.”
Accuracy of the New Helios
Four times greater accuracy – that’s a big claim and that’s one of the first things we wanted to unpack with Shawn.
“Accuracy is not something that you can just say to someone subjectively, ‘Hey, cast this rod and tell me if it’s the most accurate rod in the world.’” Shawn laughed. “And when they say, ‘Yep, it’s the most accurate rod in the world.’ Then tell the marketing team to print it!”
According to Shawn, those kinds of testimonials are great from a grassroots standpoint. But they are not the end-all, be-all. So the engineering team at Orvis set out to measure accuracy in fly rods.
“We developed an infrared machine vision system, which is a fancy way of saying a high-speed camera,” Shawn said. ”Basically, it takes imagery of an infrared light, bounced off of a reflector. We put that on the tip of a rod and cycle the rod through its oscillations. We specifically measure the first three seconds, which is approximately the amount of time it takes to cast a 5-weight rod, 60 feet – from the end of the unloading of your rod stop on your forward cast, until the time your line hits the water – that’s about 3 seconds.
“In those three seconds, a lot can happen,” Shawn continued. “We were mainly focused on two movements, and then the combination, or a vector analysis, of those two movements. The first movement that we watched is tracking. Tracking is the horizontal displacement (left to right) of your rod tip. And then the second thing we wanted to watch is recovery or damping, which is the vertical displacement of your rod tip.”
In other words, Shawn and his team set out to measure at the end of the cast, how much does the rod tip moving left to right. And how much is it bouncing up and down.
“If your cast were perfect, if you see a target, and you go from eye to thumb, to cast, to tip top, through the rod, and you hold there, and it’s perfect – you’re Joan Wulff – then what happens to your rod as it’s going through that transfer of energy?” Shawn asked. “That location of the tip top is something that we were hyper-focused on. We wanted to isolate the horizontal travel, and the vertical damping, and minimize that as much as possible.”
Shawn and his team graphed these movements of their new Helios, compared to the Helios 3 as well as to some of the industry’s top competitors.
“The tracking on the Helios 3 was 1.6 inches,” Shawn explained. “Which still makes it the second-most accurate rod on the market. The new Helios is 0.4 inches. To put that into context, the width of a tip top is 0.7 inches. So, what we’re saying here, is that we’re moving a half tip top left to right at the end of the cast, eliminating that sideways movement of your fly line.
“So anyway, we’re not just asking people to say that it tracks better or dampens better,” Shawn added. “We’ve gone through a whole lot of effort to design a rod, and then measure that it really does track better and dampen better. Not based on opinion. Just based on data. This tracks better than any other rod out there.”
Durability of the New Helios
According to Shawn, the rod design team at Orvis has done breakage testing on all models of the new Helios fly rods, and they are getting 25% further travel, compared to the H3.
“That translates to 25% more linear pull, more bend before your guide is yelling at you when the tarpon goes under the boat,” Shawn said. “It’s giving you 25% more buffer when floating down the Gunnison, you stick a tree but you think it’s a fish, and it’s 1200cfs in the wrong direction.”
Shawn explained that the other big motivation to invest in durability, has been for the benefit of the fish we all love.
“What we’re trying to avoid, is going back to tiki bar and bragging about the 150-pound tarpon that you took seven hours to land and followed all over the gulf coast,” he said. “The story you’d rather be telling, is that you did it in 29 minutes. That’s the way we should be influencing anglers. It’s no longer the Hemingway, small boat and a big fish story. We want to interact with the fish, land the fish, safely return it, and respect it. The lifting power on these new Helios big game rods is insane – and it allows us to do those things better.”
Technology and Details That Matter
Great things are made up of great ingredients. And fly rods are no different.
“We use a proprietary, high temperature cured thermoplastic resin system that gives us the best strength-to-weight ratio on the market,” Shawn explained. “We use taper strategies that have been refined so that the rods work in unison with no flat spots and no dead spots. We’re not making stiff poles with a little flag wiggler on the end to cast. We’re making rods that if you throw 80 feet of line, you get the whole rod to work in unison, transferring energy from tip to butt section in an efficient and controllable way.”
In addition to innovative materials and a focus on taper strategy, Shawn contributes much of their success with the new Helios rods to an innovative approach to hoop strength.
“I’m pretty confident we’re the only rod shop that uses unidirectional carbon in a way that maximizes hoop strength to the degree that we do,” he told us. “Hoop strength is the rod’s circular cross-section. As it’s bending, just like your ballpoint pen, it’ll want to ovalize. That ovalization is energy loss. In slow motion, it’ll look like it’s all over the place. When we focus on the combination of taper strategy and hoop strength, that’s where we get pretty special stuff to happen with Helios.
“We have a competitive edge with the people, the process and the equipment,” Shawn continued. “We have the ability to control tolerances down to thirty-thousandths, which is about half as thick as a sheet of paper. We’re doing that so that we can create these high-performance tools and also have the ability to have interchangeable parts.”
Getting down to some of the finer details, Helios rods feature premium parts, like REC recoil titanium snake guides, titanium frame stripping guides and cork grips tailored to each model.
“We’ve got cork configurations coming out the wazoo,” Shawn added. “Instead of saying one cork fits all, we have painstakingly gone through which rod gets which size fighting butt, which one gets a full-wells or a modified full wells, or a half-wells, which ones get down-lockers, or up-lockers – it’s really tailored to be the rod for the use.”
A Helios for Any Water, Any Fish
Speaking of being tailored for the use, Orvis has categorized its new Helios rods into several different series, making it easy to find the rod for any specific situation. These include the Trout Series F (finesse), the Trout Series D (distance and power), the Big Game Series (saltwater), the Tactical Nymphing Series, the Quick Shot Series, and the Small Stream Finesse Series.
“With the breadth of Helios rods, we are able to curate that experience based on the angler,” Shawn said. “Are you small stream fishing blue lines? Ok, that’s in the F series. Euro nymphing? We’ve got that covered. The Quick Shot Series is one that was bred from us wanting to create a rod whose purpose is to load and go as quick as possible – that includes our 8’5” 7-weight, 8-weight and 10-weight. Another purpose built odd rod length the the 9'5" 5-weight. This rod does an incredible job creating power and line mending ability while still being incredibly accurate.
“I’ve fished the 8’5” 10-weight in the Everglades, mangrove fishing for baby tarpon,” he added. “Then the 8’5” 7-weight is a great bass rod. And it’s also my favorite streamer rod. It reminds me of playing Nintendo for the first time, seeing how fast I can mash the buttons and hit the target. Strip, pick it up, hit your next target. It would be a great rod for a river like the Gunnison, where it’s quick, hit the target and go.”
Come Cast the New Helios at Anglers All
Thanks to Shawn for taking some time to chat with us about the new fly rods from Orvis. They are now in stock here at Anglers All! Stop by the fly shop and let’s do some casting out on the lawn – you can tell us if your best feels four-times more accurate.
