Daily Cast Archive

Another low key Sexyloops promotion! You’re probably thinking “where are all the shining testimonials, Paul? If you want to promote Zoom flycasting lessons, then testimonials are the best method!” I know, I know, but places are extremely limited since I’m currently doing ALL the coaching. What I haven’t decided is whether, or when and how, to expand the base of coaches.

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“A pier is a disappointed bridge; you stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.” ― Julian Barnes

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Things have gone from bad to worse on our trip this week. The good news is that we've found a few bonefish, the bad news is that we've not caught many of them. The main reason is the wind, it's been blowing a constant 30 – 35 kmph all week. Now, I like to think I can cope with a strong wind as well as anyone, however if I was back home on my casting field the only outfit I'd consider using would be the T120 as that monstrosity the only thing I could make a backcast with.

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It’s now good and well officially autumn and that means the water is cooling down. That in turn means that most predatory fish now feed more and feed actively, building up reserves for the winter. The water isn’t particularly cool as such, but at a, for the fish, very comfortable temperature, where their metabolism is firing on all cylinders. After the summer, where lakes warm up considerably, it’s now time to turn the attention to the pike.

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There is new discussion in sexyloops' board about learning to read rivers. Some people study and masters physics of casting etc. I consider reading rivers is my shit. It is not only because fishing a lot but also doing rafting , crossing rivers with quads, making small streams just for fun. I hope you find some useable stuff from this serie, which is coming on next weeks. All feedback is welcomed, Am I yedi master on this , not sure but pretty close anyway.

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Temperatures have been more seasonally appropriate this week, if still a bit warm. I was supposed to go North and meet Chuck to chase some smallies, but we had to cancel so I decided to spend a couple of hours casting and then test some fly designs for castability and to see if they swim properly/as intended.

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It was a gentle wind that nudged the clouds over our valley, the main storm was hundreds of miles north hammering the Celts in the highlands and glens. What started as a few drops landing on dusty leaf’s on the top of the canopy. One droplet gathering dust and grime sliding down to the edge leaving a rich green track across the surface before tumbling again, no longer pure, to the tarmac below. Here it vanished leaving a round dark patch on the grey grimy surface. Gone!

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I’m back in the UK for a couple of weeks at short notice for some family reasons. Man it’s cold! Trying to run here today I certainly didn’t feel like an Ironman. More like Iceman! The Garmin watch didn’t help much either, when it gave me a condition factor after the first kilometre of -4. Thanks for that!! Mind you, I started with two tracksuit tops, two tracksuit bottoms and a raincoat, only to discover that I needed one less tracksuit top after all. It was 14C.

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“A pier is a disappointed bridge; you stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.” ― Julian Barnes

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DiY bonefishing can be tough, very tough. Behind the pictures of smiling anglers (ok, not always smiling in my particular case) holding up beautifully silver bonefish in equally beautiful locations, what can't be seen is the work that goes in to catching them. Tracy and I have been working pretty hard in the last week with little or no return.

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I was supposed to go fishing last weekend, again in the small streams, where I learned fish. It’s great to return to them and I find it very challenging and great fun to fish these small waters. The first challenge is to avoid spooking the fish, which is difficult. In many places the streams are so narrow, and overgrown, that an 8m cast is a long one. That makes stalking even more important. We also fish fairly big flies, some are weighted and with sink tip lines. That combination doesn’t exactly make it easier to land the fly with at least a minimum of delicacy. Together with all that, parts of the river run through low lying meadows that are boggy with deep holes, deep enough that you’ll sink in thigh deep if you’re not careful. This is mainly on the lowest parts of the streams, closest to where they meet the sea. At least there’s often room for a back cast out there.

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After a very long day and a six hour stop-over in Helsinki, I finally made it to Kuusamo. A beautiful place in Finnland, where I had the pleasure to work in the winter as a guide and the honor to meet Satu and Mika!

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I had an odd, but excellent day of carping this week. The weather has for the most part turned autumnal and we had a cold snap and heavy rain over the weekend so I went out expecting lethargic fish in deep muddy water.

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The sun’s passage, now lowered, barely raising above the wood pigeon laden coppice of Hazel, Ash, and Maple, where deep, the chuck-clucking Pheasants shelter from the beaters and the guns, beneath tangles of Brambles. Sat on the rise on Mr Martins farm. Here from our bough looking down we can see along the fertile bustling track of the little Willowbrook as its waters journey through the flat fields now stripped of Wheat, Beans, and Rape, of the fattening Bullock Calves now gone to market and on to the slaughterhouse.

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I thought it would be an interesting topic for the Board and FP to discuss tackle for flycasting practise, with particular importance on the use of weighted practise flies. This is normally something I suggest to students 2-4 weeks before a trip, and something to do from time to time anyway on a regular basis. As we know, casting weighted flies is very different to casting dry flies or fluff and so also needs to be trained.

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“A pier is a disappointed bridge; you stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.” ― Julian Barnes

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A couple of weeks ago saw the conclusion of the BFCC casting season in Brentwood, Essex. This is usually one of the best attended events in terms of the competition and those wanting tuition, however, although the competition was probably the best of the year, the instructors had a very quiet day. It's been a slightly strange year for the BFCC as a whole, some events have seen people attend for tuition and not competition and others, like this last one, have seen the reverse. I'm not sure if something is going wrong with the 'marketing' (not that we do anything beyond the usual social media platforms) or whether people are not willing to travel to events due to tightening of the purse strings? Maybe other factors are at play, the Brentwood day coincided with the last day of the Ryder cup in golf, now I don't know if there's much crossover between golf (or watching it) and fly fishing so maybe I'm clutching at straws here. What I do know is that a BFCC day offers unbelievable value for money where you can pretty much have as much instruction as you want from some of the best fly casting tutors in the country.

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For me, pike season is beginning to pick up now, November and December are really good months on the pike lake. They’re protected from March 15th to April 30th (in fresh water). May can be good, but for me, prime time is now and a few months forwards. Even popper fishing, which most associate with warmer water, can be very effective over shallow water still. We’ve had unusually warm weather in September and the first half of October this year, so the lake is warmer than usual. Maybe we’ll wait a week or two before launching the float tubes.

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Last friday we gathered reindeer for round up. It was chilly and nice weather, I had to put winter clothes on when driving quad. In the evening forecast turned and it showed that it will be snowing during the night. We had summer tyres in both of our cars so late in the evening, I had to change winter tyres with spikes on both of the cars. That was last minute call and perfect timing, you could say. Saturday morning when we woke up, ground was covered with snow and roads were snowy. During the Saturday snow turned wet but stayed anyway on the ground when we had pur first reindeer round-up and slaughter for this season.

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I've been thinking a lot about crab flies recently. Partly it's because of some of the exciting new materials that are turning up from the Australian guys (and being copied by some others), partly because of the permit failure in Okinawa and partly because I coincidentally stumbled across a few articles about Del Brown in different places all on the same day.

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I’ll have to admit. Fishing and casting have not been at the forefront of life the last two months. In fact, the entire month of August saw me practice only once, and only for 15 minutes. This last week, however, I’ve been getting back into the practice of practicing.

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This FP topic will no doubt require video! However I think it’s an important one when it comes to “advanced” single-handed Spey casting practise, particularly for practical fishing. Often when we train Spey casts, we do so by initially lifting quite a long length of line from the water, line that is “on the dangle”. Indeed, if for some reason this line is deemed too short for the D loop we want to create, it is commonly taught to roll cast more line downstream, so that we can start the cast by lifting more line. I for one, don’t find this particularly practical, and think that there are two things that you should practice and ingrain…

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“A pier is a disappointed bridge; you stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.” ― Julian Barnes

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Well that’s another Ironman done and dusted. But for me only just!!! It ended up taking 3 hrs longer than expected. Normally in training I’m consuming 750-850ml of water hourly. But for some reason I just found the IM’s water brand to be unpalatable. My body is a bit strange like that. I can’t drink tap water in Essex — or in Gerik for that matter — but other places it’s fine. Some brands of bottled water I can wolf down, whereas others leave me feeling nauseous. Normally I can get around that with flavour tablets. Next time I will plan for this accordingly and experiment. The big problem is that if you can’t drink enough, then you most certainly cannot eat enough. And that’s what happened to me yesterday!

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That is the question, but not for me - at least not for now. Generally speaking. Autumn on the Danish coast can be full of fish that can be notoriously difficult to catch. Often they’re not particularly spooky to the point where take off. They often show them selves and apart from the split second decision whether to cast to one side or the other of the rise, they’re often close enough to be covered easily.

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Facebook reminded me that it is exactly 5 years from my first frontpage in sexyloops. It has been blast and hope to keep it that way. Sexyloops turned 25 yrs recently and there have been some posts about that. Paul has made great work around everything and yet in the end... We fishermen and women, caster and readers are the Sexyloops. We just need to have yedi to teach us.

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After the calamatous failure of the rubber candy last week, I've been wondering about the flybox I take out for seabass on the bay. Except for big bait time, I essentially just fish rubber candies & siliclones for most of the season. As nice as it is to largely remove fly choice from the equation, I wonder if I've become a bit complacent.

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The first 5 months of Sexyloops was not particularly dramatic. Weekly I would check its almost non-existent progress from the free library internet in Noosa. Some weeks we would get as many as ten new visitors! But there wasn’t much to see or reason to come in the first place. So in April 1999 I sat down and wrote the Sexyloops flycasting manual. Admittedly it wasn’t actually a “manual” on the first draft, but instead seven long pages of content. This took me ten days and I would regularly pop out to the garden to check a few things.

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I’m off to Langkawi tomorrow in preparation for the Malaysian Ironman on Saturday. It’s been a while since I’ve completed a full IM event and never in the tropics. I’ve certainly put in the training hours for this one, and smart IM specific training hours since January too. I’ve also learned a huge amount about my body, how it stores glycogen and the rate at which it burns it at various running and biking intensities. I’ve had tri specific swim coaching and have a very good idea about how to both pace myself in each of the three disciplines and how to fuel myself throughout.

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“A pier is a disappointed bridge; you stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.” ― Julian Barnes

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This weekend James and I have driven all the way down to Essex for the last BFCC Competition of 2023 – in Bentley Cricket Club on Sunday 1st October. Hopefully the turn out for the day will be good as the weather actually looks nice for tomorrow – currently planned to be dry, sunny with a consistent wind. As usual we will have some great casting instructors providing excellent advice throughout the day and thankfully the cricket club bar will be open to keep us all hydrated and relaxed.

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