GOING FISHING with Kotare

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33787, 8 March 1975, Page 12

GOING FISHING with Kotare

One of the basic fly-fishing skills I’ve aspired to for years, but will probably never achieve, is' accurate, effortless, long-distance casting. Some fly-casters are a joy to watch. They make casting look ridiculously easy. How they manage to keep their long back-casts in the air remains a mystery to me. I’ve read dozens of books. I’ve practised for years. But that easy skill of the expert continues to elude me.

I’ve seen Captain Tommy Edwards in action, and Jon Tarantino, and Con Voss and, more recently, Ann Strobel.

She’s the first woman casting expert I’ve ever seen. Actually, she is the only full-time fly-caster in the United States, and

may well be the only one in the world. She’s an attractive woman. I’m sure all the men at the demonstration I watched could have gone on watching for much longer than the occasion lasted. I certainly could, and was disappointed in more ways than one when she had to bundle together all the standard tackle she was using and speed away to the next item on her busy New Zealand programme. Multipliers Her plug-casting was fascinating. I’ve always been scared of multipliers, much preferring to take the easy way out of casting by using a threadline. Many of Ann Strobel’s audience may have concluded, like me, that if a woman can cast so well with a multiplier, then surely a man can? Why not buy an outfit? Which is no doubt why her tackle-manufacturer sponsor finds Ann Strobel such an asset.

There just wasn’t time for more than a few minutes of fly-casting, or perhaps it only seemed like just a few minutes. I was waiting for increasingly longer casts, placed with precision on the dartboard Ann used as the target-base for her plugcasting. But she talked about her own method of casting a fly, and showed what was right and what was wrong. The prodigious distances she is able to cast stayed imprisoned within rod and line. No rod

She showed us how it is possible to “cast rings round a man” and astounded us all by progressively taking apart the rod she was casting with and casting just as completely with three or two joints, or only one.

Then, to show there was no real problem about fishing if you’d left your rod at home, Ann cast just the line itself.

But I’m still groping. I really ought to take some lessons from a professional. If Ann Strobel ever comes back I would entrust the future of my fly-casting technique to her. Like a shot. Meantime, how do I improve?

Years ago, matching a fly-line to a particular rod was a largely uncertain matter. Everyone said and wrote that to achieve casting competence it was imperative that the line be neither too light nor too heavy for the rod.

Recommendations This theory is just as valid today, of course, but whereas in the bad old days an angler merely had to spend money in quantity to strike the happy medium between rod and line, we now have definite line-recommenda-tions on all rods.

So, in theory, all we •have to do is rely on the sports shop man to help us select a rod. The correct line for that rod is marked on the rod itself. This advance has not been haphazard. Rod weights and actions, supported by careful and consistent manufacture as well as by acknowledged fly-casting experts, have brought tackle-matching to a precise art. New dimension But we are all individualists. To a Martian we’d all look the same. Certainly, most fishermen stand between sft and 6ft high. But some of us have wrists of steel and some of us have wrists of rhubarb. Some of use are well co-ordinated physically and some of us can hardly pour out a decent glass of beer. Admittedly, fibreglass

has given a new dimension to angling precision (as the advertisers would say). Each gleaming length of piscatorial joy is built to exact and exacting engineering standards. The precise measurements and weights of one rod from one batch of 1000 9ft Superglass Internationals will be exactly the same as another from the same batch. Which was not so for split cane, was it? Again, the linemanufacturers, having agreed on stringent weight standards, make lines from synthetic modern materials, either to float or to sink, with similar engineering precision. But for whom? Have the rod and line manufacturers built an Average Angler Robot which they pass round from one to the other? Does his performance with rod and line determine their recommended line-for-rod statistics?

Wind-tunnel I bet they don’t put him in a wind-tunnel from time to time. Wind, it seems to me, is all-important. That’s why, in a new attempt to improve my casting, I’m going back to the uncertainty of the old days. It’s going to cost me a packet—and the linemanufacturers won't be at all perturbed—but I reckon that the only way for me to match lines to my rods is to have a generous selection ranging from No. 5 to No. 10.

They’ll all come in handy, according to how strong I feel on a particular day, and whether there’s any wind or not, and whether I’m wanting to put a fly softly on the surface or slap it down at a long distance. I’ll largely ignore those lineweight numbers for Average Angler Robots.