gfen
Active member
- Joined
- Apr 8, 2007
- Messages
- 6,639
To prep for my seaside escapades, I took out my new 10wt fast action (Cabela's XST), SA Mastery Striper Taper line (with AST), and made a practice fly out of a few pipe cleaners twisted over themselves.
And the result is: I need help.
At a certain point, everything just falls apart. My predominate casting i with a 4wt moderate action (SA Mastery WF line), and I think I'm able to do a good 40' cast, repeatedly, with that. I'd have suspected that the 10wt fast would rocket that fly out there, but I'm not sure I was able to break 60', and at that it wasn't a regular occurance.
One of the things that made a difference was cutting my leader down. I'm using off-the-shelf generic mono, originally about 3.5' of 20# bloodknotted to 4' of 15#, then to the fly. The leader is attached via loop-to-loop to a strip of mono nail knotted to the line. Things got marketedly better when I clipped about a foot off of each piece, to a total of 5'. Is this still too much? Should I give up on the tapering, and just do a straight piece of 5' mono?
As for casting, I tried to keep my arm in and just mimic my normal stroke, but to accent the power stroke a bit more. Should I be putting more, or less, force into the pop-stop at the end of my stroke?
My issue seems to be that at a certain point, the loops begin to tail wildly, and that I just don't have the power to keep all that line up in the air. I've also noticed that despite my best efforts, my arm slowly starts to extend the more line I throw out there, by the end of my false casting (which I try to keep to 3 to 5 strokes to minimize the time something can fail), my arms extended almost all the way out, and I'm throwing it as best I can.
Keep in mind, this was also in windless conditions.
Any suggestions on how where to compensate in the cast to try and keep it up and from forming those wicked tailing loops? I know one thing I want to do is actually use a fly rather than my pipe cleaner twists to see if that helps me out, as well.
And the result is: I need help.
At a certain point, everything just falls apart. My predominate casting i with a 4wt moderate action (SA Mastery WF line), and I think I'm able to do a good 40' cast, repeatedly, with that. I'd have suspected that the 10wt fast would rocket that fly out there, but I'm not sure I was able to break 60', and at that it wasn't a regular occurance.
One of the things that made a difference was cutting my leader down. I'm using off-the-shelf generic mono, originally about 3.5' of 20# bloodknotted to 4' of 15#, then to the fly. The leader is attached via loop-to-loop to a strip of mono nail knotted to the line. Things got marketedly better when I clipped about a foot off of each piece, to a total of 5'. Is this still too much? Should I give up on the tapering, and just do a straight piece of 5' mono?
As for casting, I tried to keep my arm in and just mimic my normal stroke, but to accent the power stroke a bit more. Should I be putting more, or less, force into the pop-stop at the end of my stroke?
My issue seems to be that at a certain point, the loops begin to tail wildly, and that I just don't have the power to keep all that line up in the air. I've also noticed that despite my best efforts, my arm slowly starts to extend the more line I throw out there, by the end of my false casting (which I try to keep to 3 to 5 strokes to minimize the time something can fail), my arms extended almost all the way out, and I'm throwing it as best I can.
Keep in mind, this was also in windless conditions.
Any suggestions on how where to compensate in the cast to try and keep it up and from forming those wicked tailing loops? I know one thing I want to do is actually use a fly rather than my pipe cleaner twists to see if that helps me out, as well.