Twist and Shout

A strange day on the water. I don’t recollect fish reacting to being hooked like it before. No runs or leaps just a twisting figure of eight in the same spot, a couple even carried on for a few moments after I had released them. One in particular, that I hooked close in, twisted and spun so rapidly that it wound the leader around itself several times and eventually came to the net backwards, I thought, at first, that I had foul hooked it in the tail, but no, the fly was firmly in the scissors. It’s possible they were Blue’s, they certainly hit the fly hard, which is a blue trait. Rainbows don’t often take that hard and they tend to run and jump. Most of the Blue’s I have caught prefer to stand toe to toe and slug it out like the prizefighter they are.

 I also lost a couple after a few seconds. I don’t suffer this problem very often either. I did hook them at quite a distance and I was using a new rod which is a bit softer than I normally use, so perhaps I didn’t set the hook properly. I usually find that fish hook themselves when I get a take far off.

 Anyway, a thoroughly good two or three hours sport before they decided to have a mid afternoon siesta.

Yor ‘Avin A Larf

I did a very unusual thing today, no, not unusual, unique. Something I never intended ever to do….ever. I bought a new rod. Not just any old rod though, oh no, I bought a rod to cast the T38. For those of you that don’t know what T38 is, well done, you’re safer that way. The T38 is my nemesis. It’s the one event I dislike, well somewhere between dislike and hate actually, at BFCC events. I think it used to be called the fishermans fly event except I think they decided no sane fisherman would want to flyfish with something that could take your head off in the right circumstances. The T38 is a 38 grain or gram (I really must find out what the difference is) sinking shooting head that, when combined with a suitable rod, has the embarrassing habit of making you look like a complete clutz. Over the years Mike Marshall has had the odd gentle dig that I really should learn to cast the  damn thing properly. The trouble is that I disliked the club T38 rod, the bloody thing was out to try to hurt me every time I picked it up. I have tried one or two other rods that club members had brought along now and then, I didn’t like them either. My scepticism when Mike rang to say he had found a blank I might get on with was, as you can imagine, rather on the high side, but hey ho, nothing ventured nothing gained. The chance of an hour casting with Mike was worth the diesel on its own.

 So, you can imagine my surprise to be handed a light, and obviously responsive, rod instead of the broomstick I was expecting. We went to the field and strung it up and, bugger me, it was a pleasure to cast. I probably made the longest casts I have ever made with the T38, not that that is anything to boast about, yet.

 I’m off out to practice T38 is not something I thought I would ever hear myself saying.

 Watch this space.

And Your Time Starts……………NOW

What can I do for your casting in fifteen minutes. That’s the time we have at BFCC public days.

 The answer is, a surprising amount actually.

 It goes like this; Roger, ”Mike this is so and so”.” So and so, this is Mike, who will be instructing you”. ”Hi, can you cast already?, ok, great, what weight rod are you used to?, ok let’s use the seven then”. And off we go. I get them to do a few casts while I work out what, if anything, needs fixing most. I say ‘if anything’ because more than once I have been tempted to grab the rod back and demand a lesson from them!

 The two main issues I see are poor timing and no back cast loop. There are often other issues as well, like they cannot haul but insist on holding the line in their other hand and just let it wander aimlessly about while randomly introducing slack and tension at various indeterminate places during their stroke. I’m not complaining by the way, this is what I signed up for when I became an instructor.

 Must get on, I only have thirteen minutes left! Ok, Do you know what a loop is? No, I didn’t think you did. Have you ever seen your back cast, No? I’m not surprised, I wouldn’t want to look at it either, but, do you know that if you actually form a loop it will do half the work for you (take rod and demonstrate). See, I can reduce all that effort, the loop just rolls out behind you, I am casting at less than half the speed you were. See? It’s effortless.

 Eleven minutes left. Ok, I want you to hold the rod horizontally and make side casts along that line. If you stand like that you can see the back and front loops easily. You have to stop the rod there, and there, see the loop form?, you have a go. No, trap the line with your rod hand, leave the other one in your pocket. Whoa, less effort, no less, no, less than that. Yes, see that loop form, great stuff, oh yes we’re getting somewhere now. Oh beautiful loop there, did you see it, did you notice how effortless that was.

Eight minutes left. Ok, now I want you to raise the rod a bit but keep concentrating on maintaining those loops, always keep good loops. Raise it a bit more, nice, yep, really nice. Raise it a bit more. What the f*** was that?.

 Five minutes left (slight panic sets in) If it all goes wrong drop the rod to horizontal and start again, that’s it, nice loops again. Raise it, raise it a bit more, and again, lovely stuff. Now I want you to bring the rod up to your normal casting position and start to turn to face the way you are casting. Watch those stops, that’s better, much better, very nice loops. Have you noticed how easy that feels compared to earlier? Yes? Good. I tell you what, with a bit of practice you could be a bloody good caster.

 Ok, we have a couple of minutes left, pull a couple of feet off the reel and lets quickly do it again, Nice, did you notice you had to wait a fraction longer for the line to straighten, you did? that’s really good, you must remember that the more line you have out the longer it will take to straighten so the pause must be a bit longer.

 MIKE!! What Roger. This is so and so, so and so this is Mike, he will be your instructor. Quickly shake hands with the previous so and so, tell him he could be really good with a bit of practice.

 Do you know what? I’m not lying, most of them could become excellent casters….with a bit of practice

Happy New Year

Yeah, Yeah, I know it’s not the start of your New Year but it is the start of mine. I get to cast in anger again. Practice has more purpose than just seeing if I can still cast. There are things to look forward to, plans to make, plans to bring to fruition, people to see and places to go. Shall I do this or that.

 My New Year started last weekend on a cold and (sometimes) windy field at the Spring Show at Newark. The BFCC holds our first event of the year there. The competition doesn’t take long, we only cast five and seven weights because we are restricted to cast in two directions and the T38 and T120 events are potentially dangerous unless the casting court is set up carefully to take wind direction into account. Trust me, you don’t want to get a slap around the head with either of those two lines. The rest of the two days are taken up with 15 minute casting lessons or people trying for their distance badges. I got the impression that overall attendance to the show was a bit down on last year but that didn’t affect the amount of people wanting to improve their casting, we were as busy as last year. Thank goodness we had two more instructors this year, at least it meant we had the chance to grab a quick coffee and a hot dog now and then. I even managed to catch up with a few friends and make one or two new ones.

 Mike Barrio’s new Outcast distance line entered the casting fray for the first time, it’s now in production and legal to use in BFCC events. It passed with flying colours, first and second in the five weight and second in the seven. A lot of people made very positive comments about it. I will use it for all my competition casting this year and I have a sneaky feeling some others will give it a go as well.

Publish And Be Damned

I have alluded to it in a previous post but isn’t the World Wide Web a wonderful thing…. or is it?

 Everything is so accelerated. I very much doubt that we actually discover anything new about flycasting that hasn’t been discovered, and re discovered, several times over the last hundred years or so, although technology has allowed us to see things that would not have been possible a few years ago. The difference is that instead of writing a letter and receiving a reply a month later and then replying to maybe one or two other correspondents  we can now discuss it and (possibly) come to a conclusion in hours. This is done under public gaze, any one of whom can jump in whenever they like and add their contribution. Whereas, those thinkers pre internet days had to sit and cogitate and ponder to work out their particular theories. Plus, they had to put it down on paper in a way that they hoped the person they were writing to would understand.

 Of course they must have reached conclusions, the difference is it may have taken years and none of us ever got to hear them unless they published a book (come on, be honest, how many of you go and buy a book on fly casting? I don’t) and the book would have to cover all aspects of flycasting not just one little aspect! imagine the amount of letters tooing and froing while the author checks out thisnthat. Now all you have to do is pose a question on a forum and hey presto there’s your answer….or is it?

 I don’t know if it happens in other languages, I hope so,  but written English is a pain in the arse. One word may have two or three different meanings, put another word in front or behind and the meaning can change again. A whole sentence can be open to any number of interpretations, if you are not carefull. I have been pulled up any number of times for my apparent mis-use of one word. In fact some people delight in deliberately mis understanding (is that actually possible?) something I have written. I know this doesn’t just happen to me, I’m not paranoid. So, those people who wrote ‘how to’ books in the past were either very brave, or egocentric, with skins as thick as a rhino. They put into print their own ideas and theories, published, and were damned. They didn’t realise that in a few years they were liable to have bits put up on the web, possibly out of context, to be, sometimes ripped shreds, sometimes defended and, occasionally, rediscovered. 

 Yep, the web is a wonderful thing. Just think, in a couple of hundred years time someone may drag this blog out of the ether and wonder, what the hell has this got to do with fly casting? What is flycasting? Come to that what is a fish?

 Normal service will be resumed soon.

Happy New Year

I hope you all had a nice Christmas. Mine was unusually chilled, someone put a bottle of red in the fridge by mistake so I thought the best thing to do was warm it up…. by drinking it. Apparently I then went on to sample the Rose, but I don’t remember that bit, well, I was very, very drunk at the time. I know it may seem a bit light-weight, for most of you a bottle is just warming up but it constitutes about a quarter of my yearly alcohol intake. Mind you it was the best sleep I have had for a while.

 I had a Vosseller DC4 and spare spool, which are all lined  and ready for action. I have picked a rod I am not bothered if I break or not, I have had it for years but have hardly used it. The fly box is gradually filling up thanks to Gary, who kindly sent me some samples to copy, and the material supplier who provided me with lots of lovely stuff to tie them with. Sad to say I now know I need a fair bit more to tie some of the patterns (whats new). The fly box was a present as well.

 I am undecided whether to go to the local river, which is a bit high and coloured, for Pike, or, lose my cherry and have a pop at a Pouting, I will see what the weather looks like Friday and make up my mind then.

 Apart from filling my swaffing box I am tying for the FF&FT fly tying comp. It’s a new format this year and so the flies will decide whether we go into div’s 1,2 or 3. Magnus Angus has chosen a particularly awkward fly so that he can sort the wheat from the chaff so I fully expect to be firmly rooted in div 3. I am also waiting to hear the final number of flies needed for the Sexyloops swap, it looks as if I will need to tie another half a dozen or so to make up my 40 then all I have to do is label them all and get them in the post.

 I don’t know about you but I am not too sad to see the end of 2009, it was one of those years that are best forgotten as far as I am concerned…except for the good bits, which, I have to admit there were a few.

 Roll on 2010,

 Happy New Year.

The Dark Side

mechanical work is the amount of energy transferred by a force acting through a distance.

 This came up a while ago in one of the more technical discussions on ‘loops and the concept had been sort of making the rounds to various parts of my brain for quite a while now, you know, one of those things that just pop into your head when you least expect it and you spend a few moments mulling it over before something else comes along to take its place.

 It’s the force through distance bit that got me thinking. What force are we applying during translation? If you read the previous post then you will see that for a substantial part of  translation we are not applying any force to the line at all, or the real late rotators aren’t anyway. Don’t forget we are talking pure distance here, not ‘normal’ casting.

 To my mind the secret of distance casting is the ability to control acceleration. The ability to feed power in progressively rapidly. I do mean feed, it’s not wham bam thank you mam. Mel Kreiger used to describe it as whuuUMP and that’s actually a very good description.

 It occurred to me that I should really be accelerating the line as well as the rod, why waste line acceleration time by just accelerating the rod, that would be the equivalent of wheel spin. What we really want is traction, not smoking tyre’s. By the time the guy with wheel spin has finally got some traction the guy who didn’t spin his wheels is halfway down the straight.

 Of course this argument might just be me making excuses for my inability to perform a long horizontal translation, but, what if I have not actually ever been a Late Rotator?  I must have, and still be, doing something right because I would not be too ashamed to cast distance with the best in the world. I might not win but I wouldn’t necessarily come last either.

 I intend to write about the mechanics of rod loading next but I need a bit of time to get it sorted in my mind first….. so you might have a long wait.

The Jedi version

One of the main problems, as I see it, with ‘proper’ late rotation is the grip. You need to change it three times during a complete cycle. To start the backcast the grip needs to be palm forward, even finger on top. During the backcast pause the hand needs to rotate clockwise (if you are right-handed) and open up so that the rod is held very loosely in an open hand. The thumb becomes a fulcrum. The butt is not actually gripped, it’s held in position by just the weight of the rod and tension in the line. Hold your hand in front of you and describe a 3 or 4” circle, look through the C shape you have now made and swivel the thumb to point at your face. That’s the grip you use through 90% of the translation. To keep the rod horizontal through this phase you need to allow the wrist to move. You will probably find it easier if the rod is canted over a bit but, unfortunately, if you do that you lose distance, the best distance is from a near vertical rod. When your hand gets to a point just passed your head the wrist can no longer bend back any more and you will start a natural rotation. Rotation proper is a combination of squeezing your hand to a proper thumb on top grip and a powerful rotation of the wrist, this is where you haul as well. The combination of the push/pull squeeze ( you push with your thumb and pull with the fingers) and the wrist rotation/haul are what gives you the massive increase in linespeed.

 All the above is theoretical as far as I am concerned, it’s what I have strived, and failed, to achieve for the last several years. I have only seen it done properly by three or four people.

One other thing that needs to be cleared up is that the translation phase with the C grip only accelerates the rod  horizontally towards the waiting hauling hand. Think about it. Nothing the rod does at this stage can have any effect on the line, it is purely sliding down the line. Drag is a misnomer, it should better be called slide. Drag suggests line tension and slack removal. This is absolutely not the case. What you are doing however is accelerating the rod in the direction of the forward cast so that when you do start to acquire the line the rod is already moving at a substantial speed therefore the rod will load faster and deeper than if you has rotated from a static start. Translation should be looked at as a rolling start, you are already on the move before you cross the start line.

 Couple all the above with perfect timing and power applied through the legs and body and you too can become an Uber caster.

 As I said in my previous post I have now moved to the Dark Side, more of which later.

Fishless In Billericky

Ah well, there you go. Big disappointment, I’m so disappointed I just may have to go fishing again to get over it. God, I hate wind. I have fished in all weathers and made the best of it but wind just does my head in. I don’t mean a gentle breeze I mean a force five or six straight in your face that creates the sort of waves you would be better taking up surfing in. The sort of wind that creates waves that try to knock you over. The sort of wind that finds every little chink in your armour, and whistles through it with glee. And to make it worse it was (apparently) a classic, ‘you should have been here yesterday, they were queueing up to take anything you threw at them, there was hardly a ripple’, etc, etc. Yeah, yeah, now fuck off while I try and get this bloody line out more than twenty feet!. To cap it off  Hanningfield is so low that you have to walk though a hundred feet of mud to get anywhere near the water in the first place.

 Then , as you fish your way along the bank you have to navigate bait anglers intently watching their quiver tip or other anglers tossing toby’s as far as they can!!. I tell you, Britain is going to Hell in a bucket, what is the world coming to? I couldn’t even legitimately sneer at them, they were catching fish, I wasn’t.

 I even resorted to putting a lure on ( Sweeny Todd), I can’t remember the last time I did that. My final flourish was to launch the Woolly Bugger and I have never done that before either.

 On the plus side, Paul turned up (late, what’s new?) along with Steve (congratulations on passing your AAPGAI Provisional), Daniel (long time no see, great to catch up) and Trev (who has promised to show me how to catch huge Bass from the salt next year, obviously a top bloke).

 It then went back down hill again when we tried to buy a takeaway coffee in the cafe and was told we couldn’t. If we wanted coffee in a styrene cup we would have to go to a vending machine… two miles away!

 Hanningfield owes me a shed load of fish and I mean to get them. Pass me the maggots.

Priorities

Perhaps I am in a feisty mood today or maybe I am just feeling a bit cynical. I have had a couple of personal observations that have coincided with one or two conversations recently and I am now of the firm conviction that of the three main components of fly casting (line, rod and technique) the rod is the least important.

 This is not how it appears though, is it? If you read all the hype (and are silly enough to believe it) then the super duper Ex D 200 ultra light weight, high modulus graphite, rolled on the thigh of a beautiful Cuban cigar maker will turn you from a moderate caster into a casting God. Yeah, right.

  I cannot deny that some rods are much nicer to cast than others, but, what suits me may not suit you so you think my choice is a pile of cack, while I am certain your’s is just a waste of good carbon fibre and we try and convince each other of our rods merits. Rods and their actions consumes thousands of pages of magazines and forum debates. Some manufactures rods are so sought after that whenever they bring out a new model their devotees can’t get rid of the old models soon enough so that they can make room for the new model. Can someone explain this to me please.

 Next into the equation are lines. Actually, a decent double taper will fit most river or lake conditions but line manufactures have given us some nice alternatives. But once again there is a lot of hype surrounding some of them. Some, we know, were developed specifically for good casters to maximize their distance. Some were developed to maximize the distance of some not so good casters. Fair enough. I think it’s fair to say that some lines suit some rods better than others, don’t ask me why, it just is. On that basis you are better off  trying to find a line that casts well on your rod than you are trying to find a rod you can cast such and such line with. Cheaper too.

Last into the equation comes technique. The problem here, as I see it, is that it’s the one part you can’t buy. No, it takes a little effort to acquire, and there’s the rub. Human nature being what it is most look for a short cut. They are convinced that the answer lies in the equipment and not with them, or at least they hope it is, God forbid they should have to put a little effort in and actually practice flycasting.