Fighting a large fish/bass on a fly rod

[DShock]

HOLY FLY FISHING GHOSTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is that YOU BUDDY?????????????????? We thought the Aliens beamed you up and hi-jacked YOU!!!!
Welcome Back!!
Doug

[EdD]

Nice to see you post again Buddy.

Ed

[jkilroy]

wayneb, what was the length on the bass. I caught a 18 1/4 lmb this spring and it was a rush. It's though on a kayak, I have one and it hurts my back. I'd like to get outriggers for it so I can stand up. I caught another nice one last year and when I tried to stop it it broke the surgen's knot on my 8lb test. I will never use a surgen's loop to connect the tippets again.

[billknepp]

Congrat's on a job well done!..It is a very rare occasion that I ever get to fight a fish on the reel, As I only try that IF the fish put's it's self on the reel...

Even big fish rarely take up enough slack for that...I do want to get those "Stripping Guard's" One'a these day though!! They look like a useful thing to have along...Seen feather Craft carries them...but the list for needful things is a long one...

[jcasebee]

Wayneb,

I don't consider myself an expert, but I'll tell you what worked for me last night... I use my left hand as a "reel" (see post on "Finger-Reeling" for explanation) to control the slack, and strip the line once I get one on. If you need to feed line, it's simple to give line from the finger-reel.

Hope that helps.

[Buddy Sanders]

Doug and Ed,

Thanks for the kind welcome back.

I spend each summer in the wilds of Colorado (tough gig, but someone has to do it...).

Don't have a computer with me there.

So, I don't get to the internet until I get back.

I'm back in sunny and hot Arizona until the end of May. Talk about heat shock, I left Colorado at 38 degrees (dawn temp at 7600 feet) and got to Tucson at six in the evening and it was 94 degrees.....gosh awful hot.

Buddy

[wayneb]

Hi All;

Welcome back Buddy, I missed your bass discusions! I alos found you comment very approprieat and encouraging!

Jkilroy: I don't know how long it was, somewhere over 20". It was almost completly dark out to the point couldn't get my cell phone camera to work. I even tried using rod as refeence for length but realized the rod didnt have any decent reference points either.

Jcasebee: I followed your hand reel discusion and found it very appripriate to my situation.

One thing I learned form this adventure it to be better prepared for that big one! The next time I went fishing I was more attentaive to using my right/rod hand for line control even while stripping.

Thanks All;

wayneb

[Joe Hyde]

Wayne,



For me, the trickiest time is when a big one makes that intial blazing run. The fish usually takes your fly about halfway through the retrieve, which means there's lots of line loops in the floor of the boat (or lying on the bank at your feet). These loops will get jerked up violently and have the potential to wrap around your rod in a flicker of the eye, snugging up almost like a half hitch. If this happens, no more line gets pulled through the rod guides and the fish probably breaks you off.

You must pinch this rapidly escaping line between the index finger and thumb of your "off-rod" hand, then just make your best guess on the amount of pinch pressure to apply as a brake.

Here's one of the hardest things: in the initial moments it helps to ignore the fish entirely and instead look down and focus your attention on the location, condition and movement of those line loops. Because unless you control their motion in those first critical seconds of the fish's flight, you're in trouble.

But...isn't this a nice sort of trouble to be in?


Joe
"Better small than not at all."