Last week I trained about 15 hrs of which 15 minutes was devoted to swimming. Yep, we won’t talk too much about the swimming! But if I actually manage to swim this week, as intended, then I’ll get close to 20hrs training this week. It’s not professional triathlete standard but it’s significant. I’d better have a good IM this year!!

Also I had 15 flycasting lessons, which is what I try to average weekly (no more!). That’s plenty. Great fun they are too! I had a couple of standout moments last week. The 170 has been huge for Dale and he looks like a really connected caster now. Speys has transformed Jansen. Both aspects I want to talk about later in this FP.

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My sister sent me a photo on Saturday. "Dam spilling." No fishing in it at all. A gravel path, a white fence, a wall of spray coming off a hydro dam, and a sky that looked like it had more to give.

I do this thing where I look at a photo of water the way I look at an x-ray at work. It's a habit. There is always something else in it if you look long enough. So I looked, and then I looked up the numbers. 900 cumecs through the dam. 1000 cumecs down at the bottom of the river where it meets the sea. 420 coming out of the lake at the top. The lakes must be high and the westerly rain keeps arriving. Southland has just recorded its wettest winter in 46 years, 62% above average, and this catchment sits right in the path of it. The country is apparently drier than it used to be. For the westerly catchments it's a different story.

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Last week's fly inspired me to do a few more simple bonefish and flats patterns. So I'll be doing a little run of flies on the theme, all of them will be easy ties but they'll also be fish catchers. This week I'm going with the Turd.

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Friday morning, wake up, have brekafast, prepare picnic lunch and partly dinner. Now I don't have to worry about cooking after fishing day so much. Camping place owner came to say that one cabin is free from now as people signed out earlier. She basically insists that I move there.
 
So I would have cabin for two nights, sounds good as Saturday evening we would have heavy rain. After preparation we took off with Gunnar. We are planning to fish Tjulån and he will show some new spots to me. We start with sight fishing, we spotted nice grayling and it was rising also. We don't have success. There is heavy wind and it is easily killing everything.

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In the latest issue of The Loop from Fly Fishers International there is an article about strength training for fly casting. The issue I’m referring to is the issue Summer 2026. I found the article interesting and a lot of useful information. Especially the parts about what muscles that are involved in the casting and also their role in the cast.

One thing the article tells us is that the rotator cuff does very little work when we are casting, with sound technique. These muscles are not force generators, their job could be described as a suction cup that keeps the humerus in its socket. There could still be some need to train in such a way that the rotator cuff gets some work and have found an interesting exercise that should take care of that and then some that could be of interest for the fly caster. I’ll come back to that one later in the FP.

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The river was alive last week. I fished the bowling alley. There was enough going on to keep me entertained all morning. The sky was overcast so viz was not great but fish were pushing, rolling, and tailing within reach often enough. I got two explosive eats casting into pockets on the far shore - good fish breaking me off immediately. And there were some aggressive youngsters and small but chunky bass - all very chewy. 

The water was warm and the SA bonefish WF6F worked nicely. Fished 18’ leader tapered to 3x - apparently too light. 

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