Thomas & Thomas Lotic 7’4” 4 Weight Review

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for T&T. It might be the fact that I’m originally from the east coast. Or it could be that I’ve always been drawn to the less mainstream brands. But among domestic rod makers they’ve always quietly toiled away, doing their thing. Despite having some traumatic ownership changes over the years, they’re still making wonderful rods in 2024.

Below you’ll find a completely over the top review of the Lotic. If you’re interested in how it casts, feel free to skip to the bottom where you’ll find the casting section. I’m a big believer in casting before you buy, so put little stock in reading words to describe rod action. Your mileage may vary.

Disclaimer: This rod was purchased by me at retail from a specialty fly shop.

The Good

Room for Improvement

Build Quality

My eyes start to glaze over when I read rod reviews that shower Winston rods with praise on build quality. I’ve seen enough of them on rod racks to know that a Winston is well-constructed, tidy, and reflective of pride in craftsmanship. Are they superior to their premium domestic brethren? Eh…

Thomas and Thomas builds a really nice rod. I’ve owned four modern (2020 or newer) T&T rods, and the Lotic has the best build quality of the four. The fact that all aren’t the same is reflective of the fact that quality will have some variability from rod to rod (and why Japanese customers famously spend a great deal of time choosing which specific rod to buy off of the rack).

This particular Lotic is as straight as an arrow – a difficult feat in glass! Wraps are tight without any visible gaps. Guide feet are straight and the guides are all in alignment. The blank is free of visible blemishes. Good quality cork. The coating is light with nice tight edges. I have a critical eye, but I’d still give this a 10 out of 10.

Aesthetics

Ready to go for a dive in minutiae of fly rod cosmetics and component selection? Let’s do it.

The blank itself is a wonderful deep blue in “natural finish.” T&T doesn’t have a consistent and distinctive blue hue like Winston does with their green, but the Lotic is very pretty. Wraps are a light denim slate blue with silver trim. The Lotic uses a standard western grip with cork spacer and uplocking bright aluminum hardware.

Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up.

I love the choice of a cork spacer on this rod, but the Lotic is just dying and screaming for a slide band downlock. Glass rods tend to be a bit tip heavy, and this rod requires a reel in the 5.2 ounce (no backing or line) range to balance under the fingertips. A downlock would let you dump about an ounce of weight and make reel selection a little easier. It’s just hard to find a lot of modern reels of appropriate size with enough weight to balance this rod.

Continuing on, I’m not in love with the spacer to hardware ratios. It’s a little irrelevant on a cork spacer, but with wood it seems a shame to waste so much of the total seat length to metal when you could be looking at highly figured wood instead. I’d like to see them cut the hardware a little shorter and dedicate more of the total seat length to the spacer (cork, wood, or otherwise).

I’ve read in interviews that Tom Dorsey is philosophically opposed to extraneous machining in reelseat hardware. He expressed an opinion somewhat to the effect of it offering more places for corrosion, debris, etc. I get it, but indexed sliding hoods are really convenient. Just sayin’…

I’m paranoid about spooking fish, and I really don’t love the bright anodized hardware on the Lotic. I also understand that choosing black type 2 anodize on every single rod can start to feel pretty boring. It is at least a standard color that makes choosing a matching reel fairly easy, unlike some other rods (cough cough Avantt). The engraved T&T logo on the sliding hood is a nice touch. Would be even nicer if the hood was indexed though. Ok, fine I’ll stop bringing it up.

Moving up to the grip, this is a pretty standard high quality preformed grip. There’s a lot of ink spilled on the evils of preformed grips, but I’m very much in favor of them. Select a grip with acceptable fill, spin that grip to place any fill on low wear areas, and now you know exactly what you have. Better than playing roulette turning cork on the blank and being reluctant to trash a grip and start over when you uncover a gouge in a high wear location.

I didn’t document this, but T&T also includes a really cool cigar style sticker under the shrink wrap on the cork. A nice touch.

The T&T signature area is a kind of an unfortunate miss for me. I can sympathize with the decision to go with a decal over a hand inscription on the blank. Inscribing rods at scale gets difficult. But… is it really necessary to include “Handcrafted in the USA” as part of the decal? You’ve got a tiny amount of area here – is that how you want to use it? Anyone fishing this rod knows it’s made in the US. Put it on the liner or put it on the tube.

Which brings up another point. The model designations are always cryptic to the layperson. Take a Paradigm for example – PA 905-4. I understand what that means, and so does T&T. Just write “Paradigm 9’ 5 weight.” Anyone holding the rod will intuitively understand how many pieces there are. Give them some credit.

This signature area should look like this: Thomas & Thomas Lotic 7’4” 4 Weight Serial Number

That’s it. Simple, beautiful, and classy.

While we’re on the subject of writing on the blank, the serial number on each section strikes me as unnecessary, but I get that it’s part of the T&T tradition. While they’re spending that time writing all of that on the blank, how about some alignment dots? I fished a lot of my life without them, but miss them when I don’t have them.

The guide set on this rod is appropriate in size, quality, and quantity. I don’t have particularly strong feelings about the T&T signature “backward stripping guide,” so I’ll only mention that it seems to have neither positive nor negative effects on casting with any of my T&T rods. I could do without the hookkeeper on this (and all other) rods, but I don’t see that changing with most rod shops. Oh well.

The Lotic uses sleeve over ferrules, which I’ll address later in the casting section.

Miscellaneous

The Lotic ships with a high quality dark blue powder coated tube. Fortunately there’s not a whole lot to say about the rod tube. A lot of manufacturers will try to consolidate tube sizes and you’ll end up with an extra inch or so of space on the less popular length and piece configurations. This case is sized correctly in both length and diameter.

For both the Lotic and all T&T rods, the cap labels seem to be an opportunity for improvement for relatively marginal cost increase. T&T uses a paper label covered with a clear sticker. As you can imagine, that’s incredibly prone to fading.

I came across this photo on instagram one day and it struck me as a wonderful application of their existing stickers, but also a great inspiration for how they can iterate on their cap labels to come up with something classy and unique.

Design three stickers – fresh, salt, and Spey- add a space for a model designation and you’re good to go. Please T&T!

The T&T traditional khaki liner is due for an update. The built in stiffener is a nice touch, but the lack of ties to secure the liner makes hiking with this attached to a backpack a risky proposition. T&T offers an aftermarket liner in navy and white, but it isn’t available in the correct size for the Lotic. Because T&T has their liners sewn all the way to the top of the slots it requires you to push shorter pieces out from the bottom and risk breakage. Terminating the sewing on each slot an inch below the top of the slot would make it easier to reach in and grab pieces.

So, you’re out of luck except for… the Vedavoo liner. I needed a liner for hiking and bought this separately. I’ll address it in a later post, but it’s a shame that this was discontinued. It’s absolutely phenomenal. Buy one now if they have any left in your rod size!

Casting Performance

The world of fiberglass seems to have historically drawn more “rods should cast like x” type of statements than you see with graphite or cane. I can recall seeing conspiracy theories that the old Scott F series (the ones in black glass) contained small amounts of carbon fiber that made them stiffer and faster than other glass rods available at the time.

The underlying sentiment of that theory is that the F series were too fast. Fortunately, there seems to be a lot broader acceptance of what constitutes acceptable action in glass these days. And you can probably see where I’m going with this… the Lotic is “fast.”

I put fast in scare quotes because let’s face it, this is still a fiberglass rod. The use of sleeve over ferrules and S glass give the rod a little more stiffness in the mid and butt than something like a Scott F2 or FS. There’s both good and bad in that. The good is that this rod will probably appeal to and work best for people who are trying out glass or fish with both on a consistent basis. It handles a faster stroke than slower glass and dampens pretty well. It fishes well at range, even though its shorter length can make longer range mending a little bit challenging. The downside is that it loses some of the ability to feel the rod load when you cast just a leader in small stream environments. Like anything, rods are a mixture of give and take. The compromise on short range casting is complemented by a level of competence at long range that is missing on many glass rods. A small creek specialist rod this is not.

The Lotic is a rod I might consider overlining for really short range casting, or pairing it with a line like the Scientific Anglers Creek.

Conclusion

The Lotic is a beautiful rod that offers a gentle, but fast, entry ramp into the world of fiberglass. I’d prefer a glass rod that’s a little more true to the strengths of glass (read: slower and deeper flexing), but can appreciate that there’s a place for rods like this in the glass world.

As I said at the top, cast it and see what you think.

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Feel free to reach out – ian [at] arcanetribe [.] com