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Date: May 18, 2006 at 21:24:15
From: ken, [pool-70-109-213-125.prvdri.east.verizon.net]
Subject: Another surf fishing myth, the big lie. I am making a "Rant " |
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Presentation Floating Line
[ Presentation Floating Line ] [ FAQ ]
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Date: December 13, 2003 at 12:48:58
From: ken, [pool-64-223-45-52.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: This dog don't hunt, The surf lie!
Sinking lines sink.
Once they sink they cannot be mended or moved.
Fly fishermen know this.
Spin-fishermen, and a host of shop owners manufacturers and wanna-be experts and faux celebrities, normal charlatan takers and unique fly-fishing bandits
who are pretending to be fly fishermen and experts to boot do not know this.
Sinking lines cannot be moved once they are under water.
What does this mean to a fly fisherman?
It means that once you cast there is nothing you can do except retrieve.
You are totally at the will of the surf and have no control over your line.
Experts that say that this is the way to fish the surf with a fly rod are not fly rod surf fishermen at all but are people who have been fed misinformation.
There has been a great deal of mis-information and outright dis-information that has been published by phony self proclaimed experts who had no clue at all as to the facts behind what they were saying. This type of mis-information has been the norm in modern salt-water fly-fishing and has been since around 1994 with the first wave of the promotion of the sport.
There are many phony salt water experts who have parroted what the party line says about fly fishing in order to be accepted as the real thing and to be a player and be able to cash in or create for themselves a reputation as expert fly fishermen by just agreeing with what they see is acceptable to other people.
That is why this silliness about surf fishing with sinking lines got started in the first place. Pure mimicry of what was being said in certain books and magazine articles by people, who had never ever been surf fishing with any type of tackle ever, became spokespeople for fishing and teaching people how to fish the surf with a fly rod.
The older more experienced people who were the people who fished before 1994 including a lot of people from New Jersey and the mid-Atlantic including Bob Popovicks had always fished with floating lines in the surf for the simple reason it is the easiest way to fish the waves and currents as the line can be mended and taken out of the waves and recast and tended and moved at will. It was eh normal way to fish the surf and still is.
It is the best way to fish the surf with and always was.
The use of intermediates in the surf is based on a lack of understanding of how surf currents work. That method of fishing was the method that that little cult of Eastern Conn. fellow used for fishing their beaches and reefs in the eastern end of long Island sound. Those techniques were not surf fishing techniques at all but they did not realize that the Conn. shoreline of eastern long island sound was not the same as the outer beaches of North Carolina or Cape Cod or R.I. or along the beaches and jetties of New Jersey or any other place where there were real waves. They used their little spinning rod techniques and
used them wherever they went and wrote about them as if they were the right techniques for salt water fly fishing and their backers didn’t want to know any different and it sold and made them money so there was not going to be any change in horses and they made up reasonable sounding alibis for backing up all and every one of their practices.
The first of which is the surf bounces around the line so it is better to use a sinking line. The fact is a sinking line gets carried up onto the beach by the surf (you can’t mend it) and if the bottom is rocky it gets destroyed by the rocks and you will lose your flies.
The other fact is if your line is on the surface you can mend it and tend it and swim your flies with control just like all surf fishermen can control their swimming plugs except those fly fishermen who fish with sinking lines.
The second is that you will catch weeds with a floating line and you cannot use it if the water is dirty. With a sinking line in dirty, (weedy) water you will be fouled every cast. With a floating line you will not be fouled on every cast. The overwhelming majority of time a floating line will allow you to fish and catch fish well when the sinking line forces you to move to another place.
I first noticed this when people would come to my Tuesday nights and think that they could not fish in water with any weed in it at all as they had learned salt water fly fishing with intermediate lines. I was unable to understand their concern as normal weeds in water has no effect on fishing with a floating line at all but does stop fishing cold with sinking and intermediate lines I did not know that.
It is hard to fish the surf with a sinking line. It can be done and it is done but it is not surf fishing. It is fishing Eastern Conn. Cult style. It is casting in spite of the surf instead of fishing in the surf. That is one reason that mis-informed fly fishermen think that surf fishing is about getting out past the waves not fishing in the waves. That is silly for a fly fisherman to even think of as here is no way he is going to get out past the surf as he would have to cast a couple of hundred feet to get outside of the surf zone.
Learn how the water moves in the surf and learn how to fish it like a trout stream. The waves and the circulation cells form current and keep it flowing and it is like rivers that flow and are steady in their flow. Surf fishermen look for and fish this constant current. Amateurs and part timers and modern fly fishing sinking line casters do not even know that it is the “totality,” of surf fishing understanding. It is current and holding fish and white water and New Englanders know this and that is why we catch fish in the surf throughout the summer. It is pretty simple stuff. If you do not fish the currents in the surf and know how to fish with a floating line so that you can fish them then you are restricted to fall fishing and migrating fish or blitz fishing. That is an empty plate.
It is fun but it also sporadic and actually gets boring after you have done it several times.
It is for beginners and part-timers and amateur fishermen. It is fun but as I said it gets old quickly.
The other fact to keep in mind when fishing the surf is that the overwhelming majority of big fish that have been caught on artificials, not bait or eels, have been on swimming plug fished in the top 18” of water. The overwhelming majority of those plugs have been longer than 7” That should wake you up to the fact that tiny flies and tiny jigs and all that goes along with those cult eastern long island ways of fishing are things to know and be familiar with but to abandon them quickly if you ever want to learn how to get results from your efforts at fly fishing. “That dog don’t hunt!”
The whole edifice of modern salt-water fly-fishing is a make believe marketing sham construct.
Everyone that fishes the beaches except the followers of the modern Conn. Cult of fly fishermen knows that what I am saying is the truth. Somebody finally had to just say it
out loud so we can move on.
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