Bling Me Up Scotty

I promise I wrote Serendipity before Steve Parkes invited me to become a Pro Member but he has, and I have accepted. Thanks Steve. I feel quite lucky to be involved with two companies with a similar ethos. Quality, continual development, innovation and value for money, plus, with Steve, you can bling it up to your hearts content because these are custom quality rods. I am looking forward to getting to grips with the AtomSix range and particularly getting my hands on the Tachyon Competition rod. Married to the Barrio GT125 it should be a blast.

So if you are looking for a new rod or a line you can do a yourselves a favour and click on the logos on the right.

Serendipety

I have just got back from a BFCC meeting in Oswestry which I will write more about on the BFCC website. One of the people attending was Steve Parkes who makes AtomSix rods, and, of course, he brought along a rod or two for us to play with. The standout one for me was the #5 Tachyon, which I am sure is capable of making some seriously long casts but when I talked to Steve I told him I thought that if the bottom two sections could be beefed up slightly it would make a wonderful comp rod. Later in the day he put a rod in my hands and told me to try it and lo and behold I had a real cannon in my hands. I could only play with it for a few minutes but it had so much potential I didn’t want to put it down. The only other rod I have had like it was the original silver Hardy Angel TE. It was the only rod I have ever owed that you could keep asking more from and it would give it to you…until it broke….and broke again, and again. I feel the rod Steve handed to me has the same potential (not for breakage). These are not easy rods to cast, you have to work them out. Nearly all the #5 rods I use for distance have some limitation that you have to recognise and work within, it’s nice to get one where you can go beyond the normal boundaries. If Steve decides to market whatever it was he put in my hands I will buy one.

Having a beer with a rod builder is interesting experience. I learned more about rods and how they are designed, blanks made and built in an hour than I have in the previous ten years. Steve is an enthusiast, I normally steer well clear of enthusiasts they can be a bit of a pain in the arse (where is a smilie when you want one? It would be an ironic one) but an interesting enthusiast is a pleasure to be around…especially if he happens to build bloody nice rods.

The Enigmatic Loop

How does a loop work? What are the forces involved? What is a loop? You would think it they fairly straight forward questions. I have always had it in the back of my mind that someone, somewhere knew the answer. I just hadn’t heard it. It comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that in fact no-one knows how the bloody thing works. All very disconcerting for someone who bases his casting instruction around creating the things. However during the process of trying to find out how a loop works I have discovered a lot of things that aren’t involved in how they work. Centrifugal force for one. Apparently it doesn’t even exist. As far as I understand it the expression is just used to give a description of something revolving around a fixed object (like whirling a ball around and around attached to a piece of string while holding the string). The force involved in that is actually centripetal and there are no centripetal forces in a loop (so I understand). Apparently it’s not a wave either, verified twice, independently, within a matter of minutes  last weekend. It is a kind of wave. What kind  of wave it is was apparently unexplainable. Then there are the things that are actually involved like momentum, tension, drag and gravity, but not the conservation of momentum (or energy for that matter) because that (or those) are offset by drag and gravity and would also depend on which way you were casting in relation to any wind. Then there is the conundrum; is the fly leg pushing into the loop? Is the fly leg being pulled into the loop? Is there some sort of equilibrium?

All this leaves me in a bit of a quandary because, for me, the very essence of fly casting is creating a loop. I demonstrate how the loop is the fly delivery system. I eulogise on how beautiful they are, how dynamic they can be, that the rod is just a tool for launching loops. I now discover that that the whole thing is mysterious , ethereal, perhaps even magical. Certainly not the almost sentient, dynamic, living, breathing entity that I have been spouting off about to my students in an effort to get them to understand how vital they are.

Perhaps if I ever did discover how a loop works I will be so disappointed at the simplicity of it or overwhelmed by the complexity of it that I will give it all up.

So, if anyone tells you they understand how a loop works take it with a pinch of salt.