Trout Eyes by William G. Tapply

Author:William G. Tapply
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

15

Toy Rods

When you go striper or steelhead fishing with Fred Jennings, the first thing you notice is that he catches way more fish, and bigger fish, than you do. If you watch him closely, you see that he casts farther than you do, with less false casting and with less apparent effort in general, even in the wind, and he muscles his fish in more efficiently and releases them more quickly than you do.

Then you notice his fly rod. It’s a six-foot, two-weight wand. A mere toy. And you wonder what this man is trying to prove.

He’s happy to talk about it.

WGT: Everybody knows that you need a long, stiff rod to fight big fish and bring them in before they—and you—are utterly exhausted. You seem to do fine—okay, you do great—with your baby rod, but couldn’t you fight and land your fish even better with a man-sized rod?

FJ: It seems to be an unquestioned assumption that the use of light tackle kills fish because one must baby them far too much. This is something I know to be wrong. The myth that one needs long stiff rods and heavy lines for big fish has been very destructive.

WGT: Huh? A myth? Destructive?

FJ: What people don’t seem to realize when they denigrate my use of light tackle because it “kills the fish” by playing them too long is that I land my fish faster than almost anyone else I fish with. What determines how hard you can pull on a fish has absolutely nothing to do with the weight of the line that you are hurling into the air. It has to do with tippet strength and the design of the rod.

WGT: So this short-rod stuff isn’t some romantic affectation?

FJ: No. It’s physics. When my 6-foot 2-weight rod is bent hard into a fish, for a given torque at my wrist (in foot-pounds), more than half of that goes to the line tension, because the “effective length” of my rod when bent that way is somewhat less than two feet. So for 20 foot-pounds, I am putting more than 10 pounds of tension on the line itself where it comes out of the rod tip going out to the fish. With the friction of the water, that is all one would ever want to exert, at least on a 15-pound tippet and a crashing fish, and that’s living dangerously. Understand?

WGT: Well, sort of. You’re saying a short rod is more efficient than a long one?

FJ: Absolutely. Consider the same situation with a 9 foot 8- weight rod. Here, an exertion of 20 foot-pounds at the lower end of the rod involves about 7 feet of rod in terms of “effective length” once bent, which yields less than one-third the tension at the rod tip on the line, namely just under 3 pounds of tension. So, to pull 10 pounds of tension at the rod tip (assuming 3 feet is lost to the bend with this heavier pull), one must exert 60 foot-pounds of torque at the handle instead of only 20.

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