Transcript: Fly Line Essentials with Mac Brown
Transcript
Marvin:
[0:04] Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly, and we're back with another Fly Lines Essential with Mac. This time we're talking about cores and coatings. How you doing, Mac Brown?
Mac:
[0:13] I'm doing great. How are you doing, Marvin?
Marvin:
[0:15] As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble, and last time we covered fly line mechanics, and this time we thought it'd be a good idea to kind of do an overview of cores and coatings.
You know, when I think about fly line cores, I think about basically mono core lines and then, you know, usually it's Dacron or something like that, that they extrude that PVC or coating on, uh, you want to, you know, kind of tell folks kind of how that works. Yeah.
Mac:
[0:39] Yeah. I mean, what, what happens is depending on, on temperature.
So you have like tropical conditions where, where you want to have, uh, you know, it kind of blows around like a slinky on the bow.
So, a lot of those tropical lines, they'll use a mono solid core.
And then, the ones we use in colder weather, they're actually like the Chinese finger trick. A lot of them are actually mono that's braided, like a really fine mono that's braided like the Chinese finger trick, you know, hollow inside.
And that's usually what the inside cores.
And then, we also have the solid mono quite a bit for cold water as well, when we're talking about any kind of a sinking line. They put all those tungsten impregnated lines usually on a solid monocore.
Marvin:
[1:29] Yeah, got it. And I guess the real trick, right, is that, you know, when it's hot, those coatings, you know, get soft like everything else that's made out of plastic when it gets really, really hot and a boat deck's hot.
And so you need that extra kind of stiffness in the core, otherwise your fly line would collapse and it would be incredibly hard to cast.
Mac:
[1:47] That's right. And then, yeah, and then the coating itself, you know, will be made specifically for warmer temps or colder temps as well.
Because a lot of the colder weather lines and in the tropics would get like really gummy and sticky, you know, not sticky so much through the eyelets, but sticky on the rod line.
That's what really happens, you know, as it goes out, like when you shoot line.
It's the rod itself that really is the brakes, you know, if you got a line that's getting gummy. It's not just the little tiny friction that's on those islets.
And I learned that, you know, when we did all those line studies at Western and we would shoot lines through photographic time gates and we had oscilloscopes and strobe high-speed cameras with a strobe light and we could see how many times it was touching blanks going out.
That was a really, really interesting, you know, thing for me because I didn't know it and it wasn't taught in the industry.
Nobody told you how that worked, you know, before. So, it was kind of fun having all those toys in the materials lab to play with.
Marvin:
[2:52] Yeah, and so, I mean, a lot of times you'll see those fly lines referred to as tropical lines, or they'll label them cold water, but I think the place that I think that this comes up the most is someone who's maybe traditionally, you know, maybe a trout fisherman goes down to the Bahamas and takes some kind of line that's not tropical, Or the other time I kind of see it is, you know, if you're a, you know, you're a small mouth angler this time of year and it's, you know, in the nineties, um, kind of hard to make it work with a, a cold water line.
Mac:
[3:23] That's right. Yeah. It's just, they take them to those different extremes and yeah, they don't, they just don't perform the same.
And it's really, really interesting. Like those cores with, um, the different plastics, that's what, um, you know, I say before, you know, they had all the access.
It was a subsidiary with 3M. So then you have like the best chemical engineers in the world. So when they wanted to work on different recipes for those coatings, they had like some of the best chemists in the world to be advisors on that, you know?
So that's where I think that really separated, separated, you know, over time.
Just they could go and say, hey, we want this. And they'd come up with a recipe that would work for those different climate changes.
Marvin:
[4:08] Yeah, I think the coolest thing, you know, and it's not just, um, SA now, but you know, they, when they put a coating in their line, it's actually not on the surface.
It's like built into the line all the way through. Um, and so, you know, when you use those cleaning pads and kind of micro abrade that line, you're actually bringing that coating back to the surface.
So it's a little bit different than, you know, those, the old days where you had to, you know, wash your fly line and then, you know, grease it and your line was greasy with mucilin or something like that. You.
Mac:
[4:38] Oh yeah, that AST technology is really, really amazing. Those little pads that you drag it through, that's really...
I look back when I was a kid, just with all of the buckskin.
You know, it used to be like the classic buckskin double taper or weight forwards, and it's like, my gosh, fly lines have jumped leaps and bounds over the years, and now they're just so much better for longevity as well, you know?
Marvin:
[5:07] Yeah, I mean if you take care of them, they do last a long time and I guess you know One of the other things and from a kind of a coding perspective is we I mean, it's been a while.
I think maybe Gosh was probably the shark skin lines by SA.
I think maybe You know airflow did the ridgeline lines But you want to talk a little bit about the difference between like, you know Why you would want a smooth fly line versus why you'd want a textured fly line Yeah, that was also at Western.
Mac:
[5:34] That's where that actually started to come from early on, I think.
We did a lot of that with dropping a, I forget how heavy it was, it was measured in grams, but we dropped it off of a 10 story building over and over with all the different fly lines that were manufactured back in the 90s, early 90s.
And then I got to thinking a lot of the boats, a lot of the race boats up here and kayaking for like Olympic title sports, you know, through, through Tom Gates, which is, that was in, you know, the paddle world for a long time, like on the hulls of the boats, they started dimpling the boats.
[6:08] And then what happened, what happened with that is, you know, the same thing as dimpling on golf ball.
So I started thinking, well, we were doing all these line studies, dropping these weights off and measuring how fast they'd fall through photographic gates.
And I kept thinking, well, if these things had a coating and were ridged, what it would do is prevent, one for form drag, you know, skin drag on the fly line as it turns over, but more importantly the line slap that we talked about, the rod, you know, the rod blank, that's what was putting the brakes on.
So there was a lot of lines that we tested and they were all over the spectrum, they weren't even close.
You'd think the rate of gravity is the same, right? So you've got all these different lines and you'd have some lines following through much faster than others, but then I realized right then it could still be better if they had textured.
So when those early textured lines come out, now there's ridged lines, you know, the shark skin was the very early prototype of those when they came out and then they got popular for the saltwater scene.
But it makes a world of difference also in just.
[7:10] Reducing the amount of of line slap onto the rod length.
It was You know helping to stop The overall line speed and of course all the all these distance records got shattered once that stuff came out because it was the way to go when you look at the world events you know in The last few years in milan england and then norway this last year.
I mean, they're way further now than they've ever been with the 508 You know distance competition.
We'll just pick one thing There's a whole lot of things in a world event that they do, but let's just look at one specific thing because the five weight is kind of the holy grail.
You know, in North America, for the average person that's going to fly fish, that's what most of them start out with, a nine foot five weight.
Well now those distances are up to around 144 feet. However, in the old days, that same distance before those came about would have been in the low 130s.
So that's the difference it's made.
Marvin:
[8:05] Yeah, so, you know, when you talk about rod slap, you're talking about there being, you know, effectively less surface area of the fly line to touch the blank, right? So that's how that helps that problem. You know, how does the dimpling or the texturing of the fly line help the loop unroll?
Mac:
[8:21] I don't know. I mean, that's an interesting question. Cause like a golf ball, I mean, yeah, they did it all that to help it, you know, maintain its spin in the air.
Um, you know, that's hard to prove. I mean, I don't know. I mean, cause we can't, it's hard to separate that when we look at these distance cast, like in the worlds now and think, okay, like Norway had some really impressive at that tournament there, there was an Norwegian that threw 144 feet, which is just, you know, that really, that really shocked me like for a five way.
Cause I've watched that jump in the last 30 years and it's part of it's the casting, casting technique. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of casters that are, you know, better, better world-class casters and techniques changed in casting as well. But I also think a lot of it's gear related.
And, and so, I don't know. I think the gear is a big part of it as well, is, is the lines are better.
So, so I don't know. I mean, I just looked back as a kid where everything was either you'd bought a double taper, you bought a 30 foot weight forward.
That's all that was available when I was a kid.
And I'm, I'm 60. So when I say a kid, that was a long time ago, but I mean, there wasn't a whole lot of choices back then, Marvin is what I'm trying to say. You either bought a buckskin 30-footer or you bought a 90-footer, double taper. Does that make sense?
Marvin:
[9:36] Yeah, it does. And so, you know, if you're a consumer and you walk in a fly shop, you know, what should be the decision point for you if you're just like, well, gee, Should I get a textured line or should I get a smooth line?
Mac:
[9:49] I would get a textured line. I like the texture a lot better.
And it's getting harder to find, like the DT lines are almost obsolete.
I mean, because there's only a couple of them made now, but I mean, I don't really understand why that is, to be honest with you.
I don't know, you'd have to ask the industry that answer.
But I don't know why that is, but I'm still pretty partial to the DT lines.
It's like Steve Rajev told me back years ago, close to 30 years ago.
He says, if you wanna play for distance on the saltwater flats or distance just to improve your casting, he says, hold a 90 foot double taper at the backing and learn to false cast that.
And it's like, you can't really do that with a weight forward with 30, 40 feet ahead, can you?
So, the more rare they become, the harder that is to even practice that because there's not many of them made, you see.
Marvin:
[10:42] Yeah, but you would generally prefer to have a textured line over a smooth line?
Mac:
[10:47] I would, yeah, I think they're superior for when you shoot them, when you let go, you know.
And it's hard to prove what it's doing in the air. I do think it helps, yeah, you asked me what I think, does it help or hurt, but absolutely it helps it.
But how much would be very hard to prove because, you know, for the other factors, the cast, it's hard to have the same exact consistent cast for anybody, even a world-class caster, are going to hit, you know, so many good ones and there'll be some that they wish were better, but nobody's, nobody's like a robot and sit there and sit, can sit there and throw all of them the same.
Marvin:
[11:22] Yeah. And I guess, you know, the one thing too, with the texture lines is you just kind of have to keep in the back of your mind that you're going to probably have to clean them more frequently, right?
Because they generally, particularly if you're fishing, um, in dirty water, uh, or scummy water, um, cause they just have a tendency to pick up more stuff.
Mac:
[11:39] That's right. It's that's right. And all fly lines, I mean, yeah, because the meniscus up in the water film, that's where all the contaminants are. And I learned this back when I got out of college, like hiking the AT and I did the Pacific Trail.
Most of the contaminants, a lot of people don't know this, but when you fill a water bottle up and you're backpacking and you want to get the cleanest water, you never want to scoop that up off the surface.
The surface is where most of the contaminants, because naturally as things fall out, the meniscus holds most of the contaminants. So you fill your water bottle up, you know, six inches a foot underneath the water surface.
It's all the dirt, like even on any river in the world, all the stuff that you're wanting to keep off your line is actually up there in the film, so you just want to give it a good cleaning.
Just a paper towel, ivory soap, water, just clean it. Clean it first before you're going to use it.
I find that to be one of the biggest things over the years in the water guiding with people is people don't really ever clean their line.
You really need to clean your lawn every time you go.
Marvin:
[12:39] Yeah, and it's pretty easy to do. I mean, there's some videos.
I'll see if I can find the link and drop it in the show notes but you know if you just take a Wash bucket and put a little ivory soap in it.
Don't want to use dishwashing detergent or anything harsh Don't use car detergent or anything like that because a little Italy pull all the oils on your fly line But if you do that, it's an easy way to wash it, right? And then you just rinse the bucket out multiple times and pull it pull it through an old undershirt.
You're ready to go. So Yeah, that's it.
Mac:
[13:03] I mean, that's how I do it Well, that's a huge difference for shooting, too, like what you were talking about shooting an indigo.
A dirty line, a good caster, I promise you this, a good caster can tell instantly in the first shoot that this line is totally trashed with till.
You follow me? Because if it doesn't shoot, they know it's not them, and so they know right away this line's dirty, which is really common.
So then they clean it, and all of a sudden, 20, 30 feet shoots further just because they cleaned it.
That's what I think a lot of the people that fish, that don't clean their lines, don't realize that there's all this potential in suitability just because they're not cleaning their lines. Yeah, but it's, it's hugely important. Absolutely.
Marvin:
[13:44] And, you know, folks, we love questions at the articulate fly.
And we're doing this series very similar to the way we did the one we did with Jason Randall on nymphing, you know, DM us your questions.
Uh, we're going to collect them at the end of the series. We're gonna have a Q and a episode and the way it's going to work is if you submit a question easiest way to do it is to DM us on Instagram but you can hit us up on any of the social media platforms or shoot us an email.
If we see if you send in a question we're gonna enter you in a drawing for a signed copy of Mac's book Casting Angles and then if we use your question on the Q&A episode we're gonna enter you in a drawing and you get to pick the essay line of your choice.
So kind of a kind of a cool thing and you know really appreciative of the folks at essay for supporting the series and I think the next topic Mac we're gonna actually start breaking down the different types of fly lines, like wait for it and all that sort of stuff.
So that ought to be a really good episode. And, um, you know, folks, if you haven't yet, you should subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss them.
And, uh, even though it's warm, you know, probably where you are, it might be a good idea to either fish early or late for trout or leave them alone and go chase bluegill. But, uh, you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few.
Tight lines, everybody tight lines, Mack Brown.
Mac:
[14:51] Tight lines, Marvin.