While helping my friend Charlie go through his vast collection of rods, I kept coming back to this one. It is a 7' 2 piece rod with the name Robert Shimane on the butt shaft. Dated April, 1980, and marked as a 3 weight. Most, if not all, of my 3 weight lines are actually about 3.5 weight. With one of those lines, the rod actually felt slightly overloaded and I tended to cast wide loops. With a Barrio Small Stream WF2 which is about a 2.5 weight line the casting was much smoother. With only 8-10 feet of line out the tip I could feel the rod load, and it was casting a fairly tight loop out to about 45-50 feet. From appearance I think it is probably a Fisher blank from their ultralight series of
the late 70's.
Charlie let me cast a 7' 3 weight Fisher several years ago and later said I could have it. Unfortunately he couldn't find it again. I don't remember the rod having this type of reel seat, but then again I'm getting old and have lost two sets of car keys lately, so who knows. Anyway the rod is now mine.
Larry