I guess the Craftversa will do pretty much anything....though big carp of today's size are a bit beyond it.
The Swimversa, however, has a tip action and is really a match rod. The sharply compound taper at the first rod ring on the tip section is like a hinge! It's a three piece rod so doesn't share the Craftversa's ability to get shut in car doors either.
It's worth noting that early Swimversas had a whole cane to whole cane splice in the middle section. The smaller piece of whole cane is reputed to take a set rather easily and later rods had a splice to built cane at this point.
At one time those early rods were unsaleable, but it seems to me that if they haven't taken a set by now, they probably aren't going to.
The Swimversa is also reputed to have been too expensive and to have contributed to Milward's downfall. I don't personally subscribe to this view having discovered that the Senior Featherlite and Featherlite rods were considerably more expensive to buy and there's plenty of those around.
Howver, there's no denying Swimversas are thin on the ground...perhaps the public were slow to buy into the attributes of the reverse-taper butt? Having owned a Swimversa I have to say it's true...they
do cast further when one employs a proper 'punch' cast, ....significantly so.
How such a butt might assist a fly rod ( there was a Flyversa too ) cast is hard to fathom.
The reverse taper butt was first offered on a spinning rod, the Spinversa, a rod initially built for the managment's sporting holiday trips and not for sale to the public. It was Milward's consultatnt Terry Thomas who designed the Swimversa using the reverse taper butt on his match rod design. Incidentally, he was the first chap to present a fishing programme on TV apparently, for Anglia, assisted by a very young Chris Tarrant.
Milwards obviously had faith in the idea though as they went to the trouble and expense of getting a European Patent on the reverse taper butt, as discovered by our own forum member Weyfarer some years ago. The application is the most tortuous and complicated bit of English text I have have read, what the European's made of it is anybody's guess..but they granted the patent!
Sadly, Milward's went under as a tackle manufacturer a few years later, which is why the Craftversa, the last to be designed in the reverse taper butt range, is so rare, it being made for just two years.
There were a few replica Cratversas made by Edward Barder......I wonder if he knew he was breaching a European patent?
Milwards still exists as a company, American owned these days I think, making its original product...sewing needles, for which it was once World famous. The exploring angler Paul Boote once recieved nods of approval when some Indian ladies saw the Milwards logo on his tackle, he recounts.
