Knot again!

My little outboard motor is quite happy now though. It has a clean carb, a new perfectly gapped sparkplug, and fresh lower unit gear grease. It is purring like a sewing machine. As always, but at least I feel better knowing there will be no hesitation getting it started when the time finally arrives.

Unfortunately that minor maintenance session took little more than an hour. And there is only so much college football and high end hooch that I can stomach.

So what else is there to do… other than standing around in a grassy field waving a bright colored flyline in the air?

Thank goodness for casting practice!

I have been fly fishing for over 50 years, although there was a short hiatus during my hormone enriched teenage years. It was in the mid 70s when I started up again in earnest. The previous few years when I was landlocked in college, I wore out the pages of Lefty’s seminal book on saltwater flyfishing. When I got home one of the first things I did was build a new flyrod. It was a 10 wt glass Fenwick that soon found itself matched to a Scientific Anglers System 2 reel. I still have both of them.

I took that combo out to the seawall on the river and flogged the water for so long that the neighbors became concerned. I have not stopped flogging off since then.

One of the great things about flycasting is that you will never stop learning… if I am any proof. Maybe I am just slow? The thing is, technology changes, and, unfortunately, so do I. Trust me… enjoy your pain free thumb joints and yet underworked forearm tendons while you still have them! If you think your casting has hit a plateau, and no more mods are required, just wait a few years and you will have to make adjustments. Getting old sucks.

So, this weekend, out in the field, I was playing around with off-centered guides, and damn if it didn’t happen again. I really was not trying, well… not at first anyway. It may have been the newly cleaned and slicked line, or the slight following wind, or the screwy looking guide alignment, but for some reason the nail knot started jumping out of the tip again! How long has it been since that happened last? Too long ago to remember! Now, I have to confess, this line was not a GT125 which I once had set as a goal to get past the knot. And I did that on purpose… once… with a very favorable aft wind, and never again. But this weekend the line wasn’t a short 80 footer either.

What was the secret ingredient to my new-found success? There was not one. It was due to a lot of recent practice and refinement to a multitude of tiny little things. For me, that is the secret: good casting is a compilation of refining many small imperfections – it is all about maximizing efficiency.

Every time I walk out into the field I expect I will find something new. A lot of times I will find that I have forgotten something that I found years ago but mislaid. So, apparently, I can be the source of my own amusement! But, other times I will stumble upon new questions… like a recent one about the size of the loop really being about SLP, or is it a function of which part of the unloading rod forms the loop?

Other times, like tonight, I will actually make some small step in progress. Years ago, I have no idea when, I began to control the line in my line hand at the tip of my index finger. It gives me more feel, requires continuous tension to keep it there, and it allow for a much more natural wrist flexion at the end of the haul. I have no idea if anyone else does this, or if it is a good thing or not, but it is what I like to do. Until tonight, I could not do it with my right hand when casting left handed. Tonight it finally clicked.

One more tiny step…