I should say that I have not fished this rod, but I test-cast the rod extensively at Sportfish Reading (fabulous shop and endlessly helpful staff), in both 6 and 7 weights (all are 9ft 9in in length).

Appearance. The blank is a very dark 'forest green' with cosmetics up to Sage's usual standard ie high. Rods 5wt and below come with a wooden and nickel reel seat, of which I am not a fan; I would prefer all metal or metal and carbon; I am always paranoid abuot damaging wooden reel seats and about making them swell etc. Better materials are available nowadays in my opinion. Six weights and above have a satin 'dark nickel' metal seat and a short cork and composite cork fighting butt. The blank is gloss as all Sages are but I personally am a fan of matt blanks. The handle is slim and comfortable, providing good feel, and the cork is of high quality.

Casting. This rod is billed as having a more flexible (but not slow) action, flexing right down the blank to give more flexibility in casting (ie single handed spey, roll casting etc), as well as overhead. The 9ft 9in length is supposed to - according to Sage - make the rod cast like a 9ft rod but fish like a 10ft. In use it is noticeably light and does not seem to have any more inertia to overcome than a 9 footer, and is extremely pleasant in use. It does all types of casts well, though (and this may have been my casting) it was easy to get a tailing loop in the forward cast when casting overhead and double hauling. Roll casts and spey casts are easy. The more flexible blank is noticeable from the off, compared to say a Z Axis, which is far stiffer. The action is still quite quick and it has no problem throwing a long line and can still land casts relatively delicately. My only issue is that the blank felt - to me - linear in action, that is to say that the feeling of flex was uniform down the blank. I am used to Loop rods, which have been configured for this kind of fishing as a given, and have a wonderful action for it. They have soft-ish tips with progressively increasing power evident as the blank flexes. They flex a lot, and recover quickly, which I think is the effect Sage is after with the 99. Effectively you feel as if you reach a 'power zone' further down the blank with most Loops that I have fished, which gives you the ability to shoot lots of line and deal with wind, even though the rod is not a typical 'fast action'. Unfortunately I never reached this 'zone' with the Sage (again possibly my casting rather than the fault of the rod) but it ultimately left me feeling a little cold. While I liked the Sage well enough when I tried it, after evaluating it against what I knew of my Loop rods, I was less impressed, especially when you take price into account.

Value for money. The 99 has a RRP of £629. There - I said it. The Loop Multi, which I think would be as good (for me anyway) as a seatrout rod or similar (my intended purpose for this type of rod) is under £300. The incoming Loop Evotec will be under the £300 barrier and comes with an all-composite grip and fighting butt and all-alloy reel seats. Even the new Opti River (billed as a specialist light salmon/seatrout rod) is just over £400, and comes as a 5 piece for easy travel. But even the modest Loop Multi would appear to do this kind of fishing better than the 99 in my opinion, and Loop have years of experience at exactly this kind of rod.

Summary. While this type of rod is, in my experience, maybe a new thing for Sage, others have been doing it for longer. When price is taken into account, I believe this rod just doesn't cut it against the opposition, especially when others cost less than half the price. If you don't know me, I am not a 'Sage-knocker', far from it; I own 3 of them already (a Z Axis, a TXL and an Xi2 - all bought at discount however) and they are all great for their intended purposes. Some Sages are worth the premium in my humble opinion. However I just cannot get overly excited about this rod (certainly not for my itended use for it - seatrout), especially not at the price. Nice rod; if you have to have a Sage then fine, but for me, it's just not as good as some others. It's also far too expensive when it doesn't, as some other Sages do, prove that it's comprehensively better than the (often cheaper) competition.