What would happen

[eponymous]

if you tried to cast a flyline on the moon?

This is a serious question for the engineers and physicists in the lot.

I'm not a scientist, but one thing I can say for sure. You wouldn't get an rises to your fly!

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Regards,

Emerger

"Let me catch a four-pounder on no matter what fly, and I'm ready to make that fly the foundation of a new religion." --Arnold Gingrich

[bobwhite]

If you can't cast a whole line here, you ought to be able to there, LOL.

Brian

[OkieBass133]

Okay. . . lemme have a crack at this
First, the moon is great for physics because you really can neglect air resistance(at least for the simple stuff). It just doesn't have enough atmosphere. That means wind resistance is out, whoppee! On to the math. . .

I'm going to ball-park this and say that acceleration due to gravity on the moon is 1/6 that of earth's. Earth's acceleration due to gravity is about 10 meters per second-squared. Therefore, gravity on the moon is about 1.667 meters per second-squared. Also, I'm going to judge the tip of a 9' fly rod to be about 3.5 meters from the ground when the line is released in casting.
So, here's what we have so far. . .

A (gravity) = 1.667 m/s^2
X (tip of the fly rod to the ground) = 3.5 m

The formula for this problem is pretty straight forward. . .

X = .5(A)(T^2)

Doing a little plug and chug, three-point-five times two is seven, divided by one-point-six-six-seven is a little over four. Square root of that is a smidge over two. So. . . your flyline, casting on the moon, has about two seconds in the air before it hits the ground.

Now, for the subjective part. . . how fast can you throw a line? Your fly line has two seconds to go as far as it can before it hits the ground. Slic (in the chatroom) gave me a figure of 60 feet per second, for a reasonable, average cast. Because. . .

X = Velocity times Time

. . . we find that your line going sixty feet per second for two seconds will go about 120 feet.

*It's late at night and close to the end of the school year. My math is right (or it should be, it's easy enough), but if any of my "ballpark" figures are off the mark, sorry. What are y'all gonna do, fire me, cut my pay? LOL Eponymous, I hope this gives you a bit of an idea of what it'd have been like if those guys on the moon had shot a fly line instead of hitting a golf ball.

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OkieBass
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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President, Venture Crew 37
Manu Lodge 133, Eagle Chapter Ceremonies Team

John.... you're REALLY starting to scare me dude. The bad part is, I actually understood some of what you were saying. I won't say what part, just some of what you were saying.

Mike

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In a world filled with tuxedoes, why do I feel like a pair of brown shoes?

George Gobel

[JMundinger]

I have no idea how to do the math, but there are at least two problems with the above calculation. First, it fails to include any correction for the lack of atmosphere. More problemmatic is the lack of any correction for the challenge of casting while wearing a space suit. )

[Lotech-Joe]

I have no idea why I read this string, but the farther I got into it, the more interesting it became. My quetion would be, "In a environment where there is so little atmosphere to create resistance on an airborne flyline and a rod, how can you load the rod?" I absolutely have no answers. I'm just glad there are no trout on the moon.
Yours,


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Lotech Joe

[James Smith]

I guess that's one way to avoid getting wind knots

Jim

[atphelan]

JMundinger the first sentence states to neglect air resistance. Therefore there is no air resistance to include in the calculations anyways

I'd say stringing the rod while wearing a spacesuit and gloves might be the most challenging aspect of the cast. I won't hazzard a guess on the distance other then to say, it would be further then here on earth.

tyeflies