Hey James - thanks for the note.

The real problem with fishing deep on the other side of the weed bed is it's a real tussle to try and lift them up over the weeds and slide them across the top to shore. The deeper I fish, the harder it is to get them up and over. Once they are on the weeds I just have to pull back and slowly horse them through, all the time wondering if I shouldn't have changed my tippet the previous cast!

That's a great pattern - I'm working on finding a place to get my bench set up. We don't have a basement in the house we moved into here in Oklahoma so that extra space is all used up for now. But I hope to find a secretary's desk that I can use for a scaled down version and tuck it in a corner somewhere.

I'll try raking some weeds out and let you know how it goes...

thanks!

Jim