Wired Covers the Orvis Helios Story

Well you can’t really blame the author for going with the Skunk Works angle, but there was a bit more serendipity in the discovery of the Helios rod design than this Wired magazine article suggests. Still, we like the idea of someone being called “Deep Trout.” “It’s not just trade secrets he’s protecting — it’s national security. The composite is used in Predator drones and spy satellites for the US military. Stone, along with colleagues at the outdoors supplier Orvis, use it to build a fly-fishing rod. Called Helios, its story began nearly three years ago when Stone, Jim Lepage, and another man — so entrenched in top-secret contracts that nobody would even tell me his name (we’ll call him Deep Trout) — set out to build the ultimate rod: lighter than anything ever made but strong enough to land the big one.” William Snyder in Wired magazine.