On Feb 8, 6:07*pm, Lazarus Cooke
wrote:

[little snip]

On the other hand, I quite frequently find that I'm fishing a twelve or
fourteen foot cast ** not because I believe in it for any a priori
reason, but simply because it fishes better on the waters I'm on.

A lot of the time I'm on glassy, gin-clear chalk streams (spring
creeks) - in particular the Itchen, in Hampshire, england.

There, the one thing that will spell disaster is drag.

So what I'm actually seeking to do is have my tippet fall in a bit of a
bedraggle, that may unwind itself on the surface of the stream and give
just a few seconds for my fly to drift without drag over the lie where
my fish is feeding.

thus twelve to fourteen feet may give me a poor-looking cast, but may
also catch me a fish.

This thread has been interesting for me. The fish in my home
waters (mostly Guadalupe bass and sunfish) aren't particularly leader-
shy, so I'm usually more concerned with simply getting a leader to
turn the fly over.

When I visited western NC and the Smokies, I found that using a
short leader (less than rod length) worked best for dealing with the
overgrowth and tight quarters. When I met up with Wolfgang on an open
stretch of the Little River, he handed me a rod with about a 12'
leader (is that right, Wolfgang?) and told me to give that a try.

To my eyes, my casts looked horrible; the leader landed in a pile
each time. But, the fish seemed more than happy to jump all over the
fly. Due to the slack, I missed some fish (and even had one fish that
I had "missed" somehow wind up on the end of my line after I finally
got all the slack in). But I had better luck when I followed
Wolfgang's advice and lengthened the leader on my own rig and stopped
worrying about how "pretty" my casts were.

I still struggle when I've got a leader much longer than the rod,
but I've been playing around with it more ever since that trip, and
when conditions permit, I'll definitely fish a longer leader.


Chuck Vance (now if I could just learn to throw slack line on
purpose)