I have to admit that I've complained a bit about Sage's "Lifetime Warranty" on their rods. They charged me $10 to ship the rod back to them and another $60 for shipping, insurance and handling, or something like that. It seemed to be an excessive fee for a lifetime warranty, to be honest. But, read on, because the end result was not what I expected.
I bought my first Sage rod about 1995. The rod has always had a lot of sentimental meaning to me. When I was growing up, I learned to fish on my own. I went on my own, fishing with friends for the most part. But, my grandparents also did a little fishing, and my grandmother was always game to take me to a remote location. She would spin fish for trout with her Ronco Pocket Fisherman. Every once in awhile, she would even catch a trout on that thing.
In the early 1990s, after my grandfather had died, my grandmother asked me if she had anything that I'd like her to leave me in her will. I knew my brother and sister each had something in mind, but I honestly didn't. I told her that I just wanted her to be around for a long time, to hopefully spend time with future great grandchildren. That was the last I thought of it.
In 1995, after apparently getting past uterine cancer, it was discovered that the cancer had metastasized to her liver. She was told it was untreatable. My company had a bereavement time policy, allowing me to take up to a week off for a funeral. I went to my boss, and offered him a deal. I told him I wanted to visit my grandmother while she was still alive, rather than going to a funeral. I wanted to take a week off, and offered to use 2 vacation days if the company would front me 3 days of bereavement pay. I assumed everyone would win. The company would pay out 2 fewer days in benefits, and I'd spend time with my grandmother while she was alive. I spent that whole week with her, and I took my young son along, so she got to spend that week with her only grandson as well. She was still eating, and I was able to cook for her all week. It's a week that I truly treasure.
She died about a month later, and a month after that, I got a check for $500 from her estate. I wasn't expecting that at all, and it was a good chunk of money at that point in our lives. I spent a week or more trying to figure out what to do with the money. I wanted to do something to honor my grandmother, rather than just pay bills with it. Eventually, I asked my wife about buying an expensive fly rod that I'd been wanting, but simply couldn't afford. The rod, a Sage RPL+ cost about $500. A reel and line would run a couple hundred more. My wife knew about my grandmother being the person who encouraged and supported my fishing habit growing up, and she thought it was a great idea. So, I bought the Sage rod and a Ross Gunnison reel. It was my primary rod for the next 15 years or more.
Once, while grayling fishing in Alaska, I hooked a 35# king salmon on the rod. It took 2 hours, but I landed that fish on 4x tippet. I've taken the rod backpacking all over the place. I've caught many beautiful wild fish in Alaska and California's Sierra Nevada, including a lot of golden trout. I used it for my first ever float trip on the upper Connecticut in 1997 - one of my favorite days of fishing ever. I have caught all of my biggest trout of my life on that rod. I once hooked a rainbow on the Kenai that easily hit 30" (I was sight fishing to big rainbows eating salmon eggs late in the season). Despite the rod being stiff, that fish bolted for the bottom and some rocks, and snapped me right off. There are 2 fish in my life that I lost that I'd really loved to have gotten to the net, and that was 1 of the 2. The other was a very large bass that I lost on ultralight gear in 1979 or so.
In the past 7 years, as I've really gotten back into fly fishing, I've slowly added more fly rods to my arsenal. The RPL+ started to see less and less action, to be honest. It's a very stiff rod that has some weaknesses in some situations. Newer rods cast just as well, but are more forgiving and lighter. Newer rods aren't so stiff that just setting the hook a little bit too hard can result in a popped tippet. In the wind, though, it has always been my favorite rod. It really punches line through the wind, and it handles both a standard 5 weight or a 6 weight very well. I still want to put a Rio Grand line on the rod, to see if that might be its ideal line.
Last fall, I had the rod out on a windy day and the tip broke. It was no big deal at the time. I had another rod in the car, and it wasn't my most commonly used rod anyway. I checked the Sage web page later and saw it would cost $70 total for them to honor the lifetime "warranty". I didn't like that news at all. So, over the winter, the broken rod sat in its tube. I was undergoing cancer treatments all winter, so fishing was rarely in the forefront of my thoughts.
And then suddenly, opening day was close. My treatments were over, and I realized I really wanted that rod for stripping streamers opening weekend. So, I got it packed up and mailed off. On the Sage web site, it sounded like they had a "repair first" policy, and I was curious if they would be able to fix the tip section. They also had a requirement that I ship them the entire rod, which I found a bit odd.
I got the rod back after opening day, but it did take less time than they'd told me to expect. When I inspected the tip section it looked flawless. It was clear that they had replaced it rather than repaired it. I was fine with that and put the rod away. Last Saturday, it was fairly breezy as I headed out to fish, so I decided to use the Sage. As I pulled the butt section out of the tube, I was very surprised. The cork was brand new. The reel seat was brand new. As I pulled out the other sections, it appeared that they had sent me an entirely new rod. This left me very curious.
On Monday of this week, I sent them an e-mail. I was curious why they'd sent a new rod rather than just a tip section. I wondered if that was policy or if they had a specific reason for doing the repair that way. They replied very quickly, and stated that they had found minor issues with every section of the rod, not just the tip. I think I'd taken good care of this rod, but it's been fished a lot in the past 20 years. Because of the other issues they found, they pulled out an old RPL+ blank, and built me a brand new rod to replace the original. They could easily have replaced the tip alone, and then charged me another $70 when another section failed. But, they preemptively replaced an entire $500 rod. I was shocked at that level of service, and felt bad about my earlier complaints about the price. They went well above and beyond what they needed to do.
My only disappointment is that it's no longer really the rod that I bought with the money from my grandmother. Yes, I still have the original tube and rod sock, but the rod is different.
I took the rod out fishing on Saturday night. Water temps are still cold, and I missed two strikes - both of them fairly lethargic. The week before, on the same stretch of water, I'd had six hard strikes, but also no hookups that day. The rod might be different, but I still spent part of my fishing time thinking about my grandmother and her Pocket Fisherman. Twenty years later, I still miss her terribly, but the rod still connects me to her.
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