Transcript: Fly Line Essentials with Mac Brown
Transcript
Marvin:
[0:04] Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly.
We're back with another episode of Flyline Essentials with Mack Brown. How you doing, Mack?
Mac:
[0:12] I'm doing great. How are you, Marvin?
Marvin:
[0:14] You know, as always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble.
And, you know, this time we're going to tackle shooting lines.
But before we do that, we wanted to give a shout out to our winner from our last question.
You want to lay out the question and the answer, and I'll tell you who won?
Mac:
[0:30] Sure, sure. We asked the question in the last episode about the Belgian cast.
He brought that to North America and we had a winner.
And I'll let you go ahead and announce the winner.
Marvin:
[0:42] Well, why don't you give the answer to the question and then I'll tell you the winner.
Mac:
[0:45] Oh yeah. The answer to the question is Albert Goddard, who was a Belgian world champion. Yeah.
Marvin:
[0:50] And so the winner was Brent Taylor. And I've already reached out to Brent and we've got his line selection and we're going to forward that to our friends at SA and they're they're going to take care of you.
And so, you know, now we can move on to the last line class we're going to cover in this series, shooting lines. You want to kind of tell people, you know, that may not know, you know, kind of what they are. Sure.
Mac:
[1:11] The shooting lines have a lot of benefit for like teaching, teaching new classes and like pick up, lay down.
I mean, you can feel it load better. It's a shorter line distance to carry, usually 20 to 30 foot of head where the weight is.
So it makes it easy to go to and from and feel the rod bend and feel the load that it exhibits onto the rod.
And there's a lot of advantages as far as distance.
It kind of moves away a little bit from what we've been talking about with fly lines and forming a loop to where the shooting line has a loop for a very short period of time and works more like projectile motion, kind of like cannonballs and bows and arrows and ax throwing and all those things.
It's more of projectile motion because the distances are much, much greater with the shooting tapers.
Marvin:
[2:04] Yeah, and to just back up to let folks know what we're really talking about is a really short section of basically lead core on a really skinny running line, right?
Mac:
[2:14] Yeah, like a lot of it's tungsten, but yeah, a lot of it's tungsten impregnated, but yeah, it used to be like poor a lot back in the 60s, 70s.
But these days it's more of a tungsten, like dust, like magic pixie dust, you know, they put in with the plastics, makes it really heavy for a very short segment.
And it comes like 18, you can buy them, you used to be able to buy them like big long 300, uh, 300 foot spools, like T12, uh, T15, T18.
I have one that's a T20, actually. That means in one foot, it weighs 20 grains of weight.
So, so yeah, it's, you can buy it all kinds of different configurations.
Marvin:
[2:56] And so, you know, let's talk about kind of how you, uh, match the kind of the head length to the ride. So if you had T20, so you got 20 grains a foot, you know, how would you use that?
Mac:
[3:09] So what I would do is like, say a six weight is pretty common for a lot of flying, floating rivers for trout.
With the six weight, you'd want to keep that around no heavier than like 280 to 300 grains overall.
So you just divide 20 into 300. So that'd be 15 feet would be 300 grains.
So, if you made it a foot shorter, then you'd drop it by, it'd be down to 280 at 14 feet, and that's all you're throwing.
So, the key with it, just so if anybody ever gets brave to build one and want to go out and try it in the yard, is to go back very gingerly, because it's very short and it's very heavy.
So, we don't make a normal, you know, powerful back cast. We gingerly throw it back just enough to straighten it, and the explosive part happens what we we do on the front.
That's where we're sending it. So there's no point of overkill in the backs, what I'm saying. So it's very mismatched as far as power application.
It's very gingerly to the rear and very aggressive to the front.
Marvin:
[4:09] Yeah, and that's really because you're not really shooting line on the back.
You only want to shoot on the front and you really kind of only need to get the head out, right?
Mac:
[4:17] That's right. So all you try to do with it in back is just get it straight, get it lined up.
And with it being that short, a lot of the times what happens is there's a tendency to kick it to where it kicks. In other words, you go back, if you go just a little smidgen too hard, it's gonna kick and turn into an L.
So, an L is gonna be very inefficient to try to hammer it forward because then you got to waste half your stroke to straighten the L back to straight.
So, the key is, like I said, to figure out what gingerly is to keep it straight.
No more, no less, but straight in the rear.
Marvin:
[4:48] Yeah, and in terms of running line, are we talking about something like, you know, like OPST or something like that or kind of what's the running line made out of.
Mac:
[4:57] That's a good one. I've used that in the past.
There's a one out of Germany that I like and the problem with building these real heavy heads on a short running line is Like everybody's thrown probably like an eighth inch jig or you know Like with crappie and that kind of stuff with a lead head jig and there's a big difference as you know Like three pound tip it versus ten pound tip it which one goes much easier as the lighter tip it of course But the problem is with these heads, when they weigh 300 grains, and if you pick one that's like 10 pounds, well it'll just snap off.
A lot of times you'll just snap it on the forward, and of course that doesn't do you any good. There's a company in Germany that makes this monofilament that starts off at like 30 pounds, and it tapers very aggressively and quick.
And I mean, it's really kind of cool. It goes fat to little, fat to little, fat to little, so the whole 300 meter spool. So you can build a whole bunch of shooting heads.
And then you splice that into like say five pounds or four pounds or whatever it is you want because you don't need a lot of really big stuff if you're trying to go great distances. You know what I mean? You just need the big stuff where it attaches to the head.
So you got your little safety margin so when you hit it, it's not gonna snap to 30 pounds.
[6:10] And then 30, 40 feet in, it goes to the really light stuff that shoots to the moon, you know?
That's how they throw it. The distances are so different.
We were talking about it before we started the podcast. I mean, they're throwing close to 360 feet with these kind of arrangements.
So it's not like forming a loop and throwing a hundred foot cast.
I mean, we're talking about going way further than a hundred foot. Yeah.
Marvin:
[6:30] It sounds, it sounds like it might be a good place to, to maybe hit that connection point with a little UV resin.
Mac:
[6:37] Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of different splices and different ways to minimize, you know, the knots and that kind of thing. But yeah, it's a lot of fun.
I mean, I enjoy the... I don't do it as much as I should, because right now I'm dry flying a lot.
There's not a lot of demand throwing a shooting taper right now this time of year, but there's definitely times whenever you're in a situation where you're trying to reach a lot further out, and there's no way to get there, which is where it helps a lot for getting great distances.
Marvin:
[7:05] Yeah, which I was going to say, I mean, the use cases that I think of, I mean, we were talking before we started recording and you're talking about all kinds of roll your own situations, but I think the common use cases that I think of are basically people fishing in the surf for like bluefish and stripers.
Mac:
[7:20] Yeah, that's a big application to get past the breakers, you know, to get your lure out, you know, far enough.
And you see that a lot, not so much in Carolina.
You'll see the big triangle pyramid lead weight and trying to throw out that big heavy piece of lead.
But to be honest with you, the good shooting tapered casters that are wide, they go way further than that big pyramid lead.
They just because their technique is, you know what I mean? I don't think, I mean, this is kind of interesting when you think about, well, who taught them to throw?
Who taught them to throw it to the moon with a big pyramid piece of lead?
I mean, a lot of times they're self-taught Everybody said, just power it forward, but put them on the back and push it forward.
Well, even technique to fill that big hunk of lead is totally different than what a lot of them are actually doing, you know? Yeah. So there's technique in that as well as shooting papers. It's, it's actually very, very similar technique.
It's just that one's like, um, like from the tournament, same in golden gate and long beach and all the tournament clubs around the world, of course, their technique has been passed down for generations.
Of their technique as far as superior, because it's been an educational route rather than go figure it out, Marvin, if that makes sense.
Marvin:
[8:37] Yeah, so let's just say we're out striper fishing or fishing for blues, I would imagine your leader setup is probably like streamer fishing, right?
Probably level, pretty short, and if you're throwing at 300 feet, you probably should have a stripping basket.
Mac:
[8:55] Oh, yeah, yeah, if you're gonna try to do it like wading in water definitely and there's a lot of new new things out there Of belts that have different loops that you can form You know, I mean to put them on different loops.
I've made several of them out of coat hangers over the years And there's a whole lot of new ones The best the best thing on the boat like like other than a wet towel What works even better than a wet towel is it takes some like?
Real heavy mono or even weed eater string, you know, the light weed eater strain just just hot glue gun Just take a bottom of a big plastic tub and cut off the sides, you know.
Maybe leave an inch off the sides and then put a whole bunch of those vertical.
Just to help hold the mono because you've got to strip out quite a bit of mono.
Marvin:
[9:35] Yeah. And, you know, I want to give a shout out to our friends at SA for generously sponsoring the series.
And before we get to kind of our usual stuff, Mac was so excited with questions from last time.
He's got a question this time. And if you want to throw it out there, we'll do the exact same thing we did before. before, you know, hit us back on Instagram and let us know the answer. And the first person that responds will win the line of their choice from SA. What do you got, Matt?
Mac:
[9:59] Yeah, I thought, well, I thought a good question would be the difference of we've talked forming loops for the last several, several series, like forming loops and having parallel legs and all the importance of that, I thought, well, with, with the shooting taper, it's a little different entity because we're talking about really projectile motion and throwing a loop of line is not the same as projectile motion, of course.
So, is the launch point, and what launch point means is where do you launch it at eye level, flat to the water surface or the grass or whatever you're throwing on, versus the angle upward.
The launch point, is it the same or is it very dissimilar from shooting tapers back to forming loops and talking about fly lines where we form loops, you know, with weight forwards, double tapers, that kind of thing.
So let's just get a question on that. It's basically a yes, no question.
Is it same or is it different?
And let's see what happens.
Marvin:
[10:52] Are you feeling lucky?
Yeah But I think that'd be I think that'd be a good one, you know For folks to kind of work through before they answer because because it'll help them kind of come up with their answer You know, yeah, and so folks, you know, remember what we're doing, you know We love questions and we've got one more episode We're going to talk about line maintenance and then we're going to have our big q a episode You can email us questions.
You can dm us on social media And if you send in a question, we're going to enter a drawing for a signed copy of Mac's book, Casting Angles.
And then if we select your question for the Q&A episode, you're going to enter a drawing to pick some essay lines of your choice. And so, you know, you're running out of time to win, and if you don't play, you can't win.
So that's kind of all I know. What do you think, Mac Brown?
Mac:
[11:34] I think that sounds like a great plan.
Marvin:
[11:37] Yeah, well, you know, hopefully, folks, we're on the other side of Labor Day.
Um, I think we've got a little bit of heat and then it's going to start to cool off or and be able to start to kind of get back to more of our trout fishing groove and, uh, yo it to yourself to get out there and catch a few tight lines. everybody.
Tight lines, Mac. Tight lines, Marvin.