Took my single hand rod to the Lower Stan yesterday. What a nice change of pace. I'll just come out and say it. My single hand rod use has improved ten fold since I started using a two hander.
I've always been able to cast over hand. Nothing has changed there. However, in the tight confines of your typical river or creek around here, there is always something behind you limiting your cast. My options used to be a roll cast or simply flicking the thing out there as far as possible. Which usually wasn't very far or very graceful.
Now that I'm decent enough in the various spey casts thanks to the switch and spey rods, I was able to spey cast my single hander as far as I needed. More than 50 feet at times. What a difference. You probably know this is coming, but I now prefer spey casting to overhead when using the one hander. Why? Because it is less work and requires no false casts. You can whip that sucker out there in a couple of moves. Even if you are making a wholesale direction change.
The only downside was when I had a few split shot on and a heavy fly at the same time. It started to get sloppy. The WF line just didn't have enough weight upfront to turn it over smoothly.
Something else I tried, that I've never done before on a river is to put on a full sinking line instead of a floater. This provided a few benefits. First it sunk, just like it is supposed to. And since I was doing sub surface fishing, that was perfect. Second, the 40 foot head is completely clear. Less likely to scare the fish off.
I won't be giving up my two handed rod anytime soon. However, I can say that I have a new found joy for casting single handers again. While it was more fatiguing than using a two hander, it wasn't bad.
2 comments:
So the big question is: Did you catch anything? Any pics?
Hi there. I did catch some small ones. But nothing worth talking about. I wrote a quick entry regarding that day.
Thanks for reading.
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