Un jour, ma cabane

A qui de droit : allez voter ! Hop hop hop.

For the love of water

Sorry Marc. Couldn’t help it. (Stolen from The Trout Underground).

EPIC

this has nothing to do with anything, except I caught it on The man in the striped pajamas, a blog vaguely related to fly fishing, I got to check because LoFiFly resurected a couple of day ago and this guy commented.

Fascinating, I know.

Anyway, I got to watch The Animals doing The House of the Rising Sun, something I had never actually seen. It’s the dog’s bollocks. These guys are intense.

A fat +25pts bonus for Alan Price kicking serious ass on the Vox Continental, and Eric Burdon looking like he’s just out of jail. How appropriate.

The way it was done then

Seen on the Angler’s Culvert, where you will find the best fishing/whisky mix of the whole internet. Desperately calling for something else in the fishporn department. Maybe something involving something else than big fishes?

Like three major writers and not a few mustache.

shoot’em up

I had a big epiphany a couple of days ago when I first met here with the notion of a loop fight. You know, I’m rather on the quarrelsome side of the spectrum. It’s not really for the competition (I don’t care much for that), what I like is rather aggression. Combat stuff. So when Paul mentioned that you could actually fight with a flyline, I was all ‘but of course we can!! I want to. Right now!!”

I don't think so, my lad. I chose the 5wt.

The problem, obviously, is to find someone crazy enough to actually want to do this. Your typical fly fisher is a rather benign guy, usually, so it’s probably not going to be trivial. But then, I have a plan B. For, as you may know, I have kids…

So I said to the girls: let’s play a game. I’m the fisherman, you are the fishes. If I touch you with the fly, I catch you. If the other one touches you, you’re free. Each time I catch you both I win. Needless to say, what followed was an hour of pure flycasting madness for me and huge fun for my baby dolls. Like reservoir trouts, the little buggers quickly learn how to swim just beyond your reach… If you’ve got young kids (around 6 is perfect) everyone’s in for a treat.

You may even argue that the new 4wt you need is especially for playing with the kids. How about that?

But now I want some symmetry. I want to dodge. I want to fire and forget. I want to go all Indiana Jones with my line… Greg, where are you ? Grab your XP, I have something for you.

in a loop fight, size may well matter

Holly Molly strikes again

Without saying

Steve Zakur, who is quite funnier than a colon cancer, kindly shares with us the following Painfully Obvious Tip™.

When fishing to downstream lies on a small stream, resist the urge to stand where the fish are and cast to where the fish are not while wearing a bright red sweatshirt.

We should all thank him for imparting us such wisdom. Many more life-changing lessons are to be found on his most excellent blog. Sipping Emergers.

the PULD complex

Marc having unexpectedly turned into Sigmund Freud, he’s all about what’s happening into the dark corners of my mind, and since he won’t take ‘wtf??’ as an answer I’d better practice my introspection. Current exercise: what did you think about your mother’s boobs? if you don’t want to think about them, you’re just repressing, that’s sad but you can always try to describe with full detail what happens in a PULD.

yeah, PULD, or PU&LD. that’s how they call it on ‘loops. In case you’re like myself somewhat unfamiliar with the pro’s lingo (and then feel retarded) it’s for Pick Up & Lay Down.

Freud, on the verge to discover the second essential with Nemon. (1936)

so, my unenlightened version would be like: take rod… sling back… tug… sling forward… follow. but that won’t do, obviously. I need to get a finer grain.

1. initial position: right handed, open. left foot in front, right foot behind. body plane slightly tilted towards the line plane. 10m of line on the ground, straight. no slack. rod in line with the line.
2. grip rather loose, wrist slightly bent to have the rod in line with forearm.
3. start moving up the rod by flexing the elbow and shoulder. smooth acceleration. the whole movement goes towards a sharp stop with arm horizontal, forearm vertical and wrist straight. the rod is at one o’clock.
4. your eyes follow the loop, hence your head has turned back over the shoulder to look at the backcast 
5. meantime, and just after the stop, try to squeeze and release the grip to absorb bounce (not very clear what to do, but you try to dampen the goddamn thing)
6. arm extends a little in direction of backcast while the loop unrolls
7. when the line is straight, start front cast. smooth acceleration to a stop. stop should be more or less 1-2 o’clock. things you try not to forget:
   1. less power
   2. concentrate on loop: let the loop happen correctly, then the rest will follow (relatively easy to believe at 10m)
   3. careful with power, not too much, else you tail
   4. be smooth and sharp but smooth
   5. try to have the tip moving in a relatively straight path. this one is wishful thinking, because the tip moves too fast and I have no fucking idea of its trajectory (the tail will tell me)
   6. think you shoot into a tube to try to get a narrow loop
8. all this went well, so the loop is nice and not tailing (much) and maybe it has a kind of point to it. (you should film it to really know but lazy)
9. just before the line straighten, start lowering the tip. the idea is to follow the line as it falls on the ground.

Now there’s a cool variant where you first send a wave in the line to take it of the surface before actually back casting it, I guess it makes for a quieter pick up. at least, that’s what I imagined when I saw Marc doing this:

spent an hour this morning with my ol’ 4wt, trying to have the quietest possible PÜLD (sounds like an ikea name now ). obviously not very quiet yet. I like these “presentation oriented” stuff for the rhythm. a PÜLD cycle is like 2 seconds. you do that for ten minutes and that’s three hundred casts. you feel your arm working. ^_^

Un jour, ma cabane

Who said a fishing shack should be a wooden nostalgic affair? A good dose of modernism will not hurt, and will perfectly compliment the space age stuff they use to make waders, blanks, lines and leaders. I’ll wait for the evening hatch with a Glen Rothes, listening to the Dialogue de l’ombre double.

(Girls not included)

On Voodoo and Zen

Last Sunday, on Sexyloop’s frontpage, one read the following words of wisdom from Will Shaw:

One way to keep the unconscious in its box for a while is to try to do things badly. Aim to cast fat loops, and then cast tails. Aim to let casts fail by underpowering. Allow yourself/them to break the rules. It’s ok if the line hits the ground. It’s ok if the loop collapses.

Sometimes, because we aren’t worried about screwing up we find our own way into making a good cast. We prove to our unconscious that there’s nothing to worry about, and allow ourselves to learn something useful.

That’s something I’ve tried. In November, I was just desperate with the tailing loops I consistently produced. I was trying too hard, and in a state of very unrelaxed butt. Let’s face it, my casting was shit. And actually it helped me not a little when, running out of patience and courage, I started to just goof around with the line, doing the stuff Will talks about, taming the conscious mind, letting the unconscious free, in short: making silly cast.

Quite an excellent gift for a frequent flyer

What really made me free and opened the gates of (more or less) proper fly casting is the voodoo cast. Trying complicated things was part of my ‘let’s do n’importe quoi‘ program, and meant to fuck up big time. For some reason, it worked almost at first try. Now the voodoo is a mainly trick cast, in the sense that I’ll probably never actually use it while fishing, unless there are ladies to impress (a rare event indeed where I usuallly fish). But it helped me quite a lot to take it easy with the line. To let it go. To let it flow…

[Insert here a long elaboration about zen and fly casting, letting the loop happen, and all that jazz, which is all very well, but faces the same impossibility to be correctly phrased and understood as most the things the Buddha tries to teach...]

Stephan Dombaj, doing the voodoo

So, please, next time you hit the lawn (do it! your casting needs it!) remember to spend at least 20 min practicing your silly casts. As usual, the boys from Jazz and Fly fishing got it all, right on the money.

It seems to help if you do this in stunningly beautiful surroundings. Like my home waters below.