Boudreaux and DeMarco were doing construction work at the top of a new
oil platform in Morgan City. Every day, as they ate lunch, Boudreaux would
talk about how wonderful his meal was. “Today’s Monday so it’s red beans
and rice,” he would say, “with andouille sausage.” DeMarco
would look down at his Tupperware of cold spaghetti and grunt. It was like
that every day because Tuesday was jambalaya for Boudreaux, Wednesday was
gumbo, Thursday was chicken sauce picante, and Friday was catfish courtbouillon.
And every day that went by, DeMarco had cold spaghetti and got more frustrated
at his boring lunch.
Finally, DeMarco threw down his spaghetti bowl and yelled: “Plain pasta
again! If I get plain pasta one more time for lunch I’m going to jump off
this rig.”
The next day, DeMarco opened his lunch box, saw plain pasta, and jumped.
At the funeral, everyone had heard the pasta story and wondered how his
wife could have done that to him.
“Hey, don’t look at me,” she said, “He always made his own lunch!”
Spaghetti is actually good for you. Pasta in the USA is fortified with folic
acid (25% of the recommended daily value in a one cup) due to FDA regulations
that require enriched grain products to contain this essential vitamin. That’s
nice to know.
But…
Spaghetti and fly fishing are not usually spoken of together, at least not
pleasantly. A spaghetti pile sometimes refers to the tangled mess that occurs
when changing fly line, or to the line pile wrapped around a fisherman’s feet
in the bottom of a boat, or to the knotty mess produced by a badly looping
cast, and then there are spaghetti rods.
Unlike freshwater trout, bass have hard mouths,
comprised primarily of bone.If you want to frustrate your Colorado trout fishing
guide, always do a hard snap set. Doesn’t work there. Setting a hook for trout
involves raising the rod gently. Setting a hook in a bass requires
slamming the hook home. A two inch bluegill flying over your shoulder after
a hook set means you set it about right for a bass.
In order to set the hook hard you usually need: (1) a medium to fast action
rod, (2) sufficiently heavy tippet (snapping tiny tippet is infuriating and
won’t catch you any fish), and (3) a fly with an adequately exposed hook.
(A fly with too much of the gap taken up by body material may not have enough
hooking potential.) But of these three, the most important is having a good
rod - not a strand of wet spaghetti with a reel. Infants in Sicily can make
pasta. Americans also like pasta, a lot. Think you know about pasta? Okay,
there are more than 600 pasta shapes in seven general groupings: shaped (spirals,
shells, etc.), tubular (macaroni, penne, ziti, etc.), strand (spaghetti, angel
hair, etc.), ribbon (fettuccini, lasagna, bow tie, etc.) soup (round, alpha
bits, wheels, etc.), stuffed (ravioli, manicotti, etc.) and Asian. Most pasta
consumed in America is made from wheat grown in North Dakota (didn’t know
that, huh?). Like many things for which more than one country wants to take
credit, the history of pasta is cloudy. Pasta has existed in some form since
the days of the Etruscans and Roman Empire (the god Vulcan is supposed to
have invented stringed dough). Curiously, popular history says that it was
invented in China, and that Marco Polo brought the knowledge of this food
to Venice. Actually, the pasta Polo imported was likely made from rice flour
while it is generally accepted that the durum wheat used in Sicily during
the Middle Ages was actually an Arab food. (Confused yet?) And yet, the Chinese
were apparently making some kind of noodles in 3000 B.C. Eventually someone
somewhere invented pasta. But, you can bet they didn’t use it fly fishing
for bass.
Fly rods are classified as being tip flex (fast or stiff) or mid-flex (moderate)
or full flex (slow or soft). [The terms are a bit bass-ackwards because when
the amount of stored energy is large we describe the action as “slow” and,
if small, the action is “fast”.] Experience with slow- soft-full
flex rods has repeatedly proven that they don’t work as well for bass. Trust
the field tests here, a slow action rod is sometimes completely wrong for
these fish. Why? Because it’s like spaghetti. A slow action rod is very flexible
and will bend (load) for much (about 3/4) of it’s length. When a fly rod
is flexed during a cast, some of the energy supplied by the angler is stored
in the bent rod as potential energy. As the rod straightens at the end of
the forward stroke and the line is released this energy is imparted to the
line as kinetic energy added to the kinetic energy in the line. This total
energy determines the initial line speed. Soft rods “give,” so they will not
generate high line speeds on a cast and for the same reason simply do not
have the backbone for a hard hook set. These full flex rods are designed for
anglers that fish for soft mouthed fish, or for smaller fish with tiny flies
on smaller waters where the key is short and accurate casts. A soft rod responds
well to a gentle casting stroke for a soft presentation and gives a lot of
feel when fighting a fish, but, this rod is almost impossible to use for long
casts, or casts in the wind, or with larger flies.
Boron and graphite make for faster rods. Some bamboo and certain fiberglass
materials are famous (or infamous) for producing a slow rod. But don’t take
it on faith, here’s an easy test. Select the softest rod you own. Stand with
your rod and have another person hold a piece of cardboard about 30’ away,
with a flat side facing you. Put a bare hook on the end of your tippet and
then on the cardboard with the point facing into the cardboard. Set the hook.
Don’t be at all surprised if the hook barely penetrates the cardboard. [Why?
RF + LSÞ NSP = NF. This translates to Rod Flex plus Line Stretch produces
No Setting Power and, consequently, equals No Fish.]
When checking out your next “I think I’m going to buy this” new rod, think
of pasta. Consider that some noodles hold sauces better than others: you want
macaroni to have more resilience than angel hair, penne to hold a rigid shape
better than fettuccini. When semolina flour is used, you get the basic pasta
flavor with a creamy yellow color and this pasta has lots of gluten to give
the dough elasticity to use for a variety of shapes. (You probably like this
and think of it as “regular tasting pasta.”) Whole wheat flour produces nuttier
tasting pasta that is medium tan to light brown in color. Buckwheat and oat
flour produces strong nutty flavored pasta that is light to medium brown in
color (but you don’t see these often). Rice flour produces a mild pasta that
is translucent white in color. Everyone can enjoy different pastas, but you
shouldn’t expect to like them all, and you shouldn’t expect to like every
rod you try.
Slow action rods have a specific function in fly fishing and are designed
to alleviate specific problems. The tremendous flexibility of a slow action
fly rod allows some of the strain that would otherwise be put on a tippet
during a fish strike to be transferred to the rod itself. Because of this,
when using very light tippet, a slow action fly rod can prevent many a lost
fish due to tippet breakage. [Most fly fishermen are acquainted with tippet
down to 7X, but tippet is available as small as Varivas Midge Super Tippet
in 12X (.0026") - that breaks if you even breathe “mid-flex” in its direction.]
Also, because of the reflex action caused by a soft rod’s bending (loading
and unloading), a full flex rod can be very forgiving. The best example
of this is roll casting, a very easy task for a soft rod where the “whip”
of the rod produces a smooth easy loop on the water. This same skill requires
better timing and technique for a stiffer rod. Of course, for some, trying
to use a full flex rod can be totally frustrating [it seems as if you could
nap while waiting for the rod to load]. Then there is line wave. After the
line is released from a soft action rod, if there is the slightest overpowering
of the rod, the rod continues to flex in the opposite direction and the rod
tip may drop below the line. This will produce an undesirable wave in the
line which inhibits a straight layout on the cast and causes slack. The wave
is less pronounced when using fast action rods since less energy remains in
the rod and the reverse tip deflection is small. Consequently, while slow
action fly rods are ideal for some situations, the lack of all around versatility
makes it a bad choice for fisherman who can’t afford a complete arsenal of
rods.
Now for the other side of the coin. A stiff rod that is used to cast short
distances will not flex very much (if at all) and the energy stored in the
rod will be negligible. A soft rod under the same conditions will flex and
more of the energy will be stored in the rod for release. Casting a stiff
rod takes practice because it requires more muscle (since the rod flexes less,
physics tells us it provides less assistance in propelling the fly). In some
cases, particularly on short casts with only a little fly line out of the
tip top, it feels like trying to manipulate a 9’ broomstick (because the rod
will not flex), and can quickly wear out a casting arm. That being said, a
firm flex has advantages in that it can generate greater line speed, does
excellently on sidearm and underhand casts, and casts better in windy conditions.
However, even though a stiffer rod will do all these things a soft rod can’t,
there are two drawbacks - cost and breakage. Breakage? Yep. Here’s why. “Modulus”
is the stiffness to weight ratio of the graphite that’s used to create a rod
blank, it relates to the tensile strength of the rod’s fibers - the higher
the modulus rating, the stronger the fiber for its size. When rod makers
increase the modulus of the graphite, they increase the ability of that graphite
to store and release energy. Increasing the modulus increases the reaction
speed and power of the rod blank - and the cost. A tip flex rod is composed
of higher modulus graphite, which can cost the rod builder 10 times as much
as a lower modulus shaft. Like a strand of uncooked spaghetti, higher modulus
also results in a rod blank that is somewhat brittle and more likely to break
from impact fracture (like being hit by epoxy coated, conehead or beadhead
flies, or being dropped) or from stress (hook set). Good high modulus rods
aren’t as brittle as uncooked spaghetti, but are susceptible to breakage,
particularly on some of the new 4-6 piece rods where there are ferrules at
critical stress points. When an immovable object meets and irresistible force
something’s got to give. A really hard hook set on a big fish can snap a fast
flex rod. Trust the field tests on this.
One last issue involves carrying rods and rod storage in a car, boat, canoe
or kayak. Most fly fishermen hook the last fly they used in the hook keeper
or first guide on the rod, tighten the line till it is straight and snug against
the rod, and then put the straight rod and snugged line in a car rack or into
boat storage. Sorry, but this just won’t work with a soft flex. Getting the
line tight enough to keep the hook in the hook keeper of a slow action rod
bends the tip of the rod significantly. The rod becomes question mark shaped
and is almost impossible to carry or store in that shape. The solution to
this is to retrieve the fly line until the fly it is completely snug against
the tiptop so that, from fly to reel is a straight line all the way down the
guides.
Bass eat prickly things including other fish - fish with fins and spines.
If not for hard mouths, this would be most difficult, certainly uncomfortable,
and maybe impossible. Oh, and as for hooked fish supposedly feeling pain,
maybe PETA members should try eating a crawfish whole. If it hurt, fish wouldn’t
do it.
Originally published Sept 28, 2009 on Fly Anglers Online by Bob Boese.