S5, Ep 108: Fly Line Essentials with Mac Brown

Marvin Cash: Hey, folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. We're back with another episode of Fly Line Essentials with Mac Brown. How you doing, Mac?

Mac Brown: I'm doing great. How are you, Marvin?

Marvin Cash: You know, as always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble. This time we're going to tackle shooting lines. But before we do that, we wanted to give a shout out to our winner from our last question. You want to lay out the question, the answer, and I'll tell you who won.

Mac Brown: Sure, sure. We asked the question the last episode about the Belgian cast. He brought that to North America. We had a winner. And I'll let you go ahead and announce the winner.

Marvin Cash: Well, why don't you give the answer to the question and then I'll tell you the winner.

Mac Brown: Oh, yeah. The answer to the question is Albert Goddard, who was a Belgian world champion.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And so the winner was Brent Taylor. And I've already reached out to Brent and we've got his line selection, and we're going to forward that to our friends at SA and they're going to take care of you.

So now we can move on to the last line class we're going to cover in this series. Shooting lines. You want to kind of tell people that may not know what they are.

Mac Brown: Sure. The shooting lines have a lot of benefit for teaching, teaching new classes and like pick up, lay down. I mean, you can feel it load better. It's a shorter line distance to carry usually 20 to 30 feet of head where the weight is. So it makes it easy to go to and from and feel the rod bend and feel the load that it exhibits onto the rod.

There's a lot of advantages as far as distance. It kind of moves away a little bit from what we've been talking about with flylines and forming a loop to where the shooting line has a loop for a very short period of time and works more like projectile motion, kind of like cannonballs and bows and arrows and axe throwing and all those things. It's more projectile motion because the distances are much, much greater with the shooting tapers.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And just back up to let folks know what we're really talking about is a really short section of basically lead core on a really skinny running line, Right?

Mac Brown: Yeah. Like, a lot of it's tungsten, but yeah, a lot of us tungsten impregnated. But yeah, it used to be lead core a lot back in the 60s, 70s. But these days it's more of like tungsten, like dust, they magic pixie dust, you know, they put in with the plastics, makes it really heavy for a very short segment.

And it comes like 18. You can buy them. You used to be able to buy them like big, long 300-foot spools, like T12, T15, T18. I have one that's T20 actually. That means in one foot it weighs 20 grains of weight. So yeah, but you can buy it all kinds of different configurations.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And so let's talk about kind of how you match the head length to the rod. So if you had T20, so you got 20 grains a foot, how would you use that?

Mac Brown: So what I would do is like, say a 6-weight's pretty common for a lot of fly anglers, floating rivers for trout. With the 6-weight, you'd want to keep that around no heavier than like 280 to 300 grains overall. So you just divide 20 into 300. So that'd be 15 feet would be 300 grains. So if you made it a foot shorter, then you'd drop it by 20. It'd be down to 280 at 14 feet. And that's all you're throwing.

So the key with it, the key with it just so if anybody ever gets brave to build one and want to go out and try it in the yard, is to go back very gingerly because it's very short and it's very heavy. So we don't make a normal, powerful backcast. We gingerly throw it back just enough to straighten it. And the explosive part happens. What we do on the front, that's where we're sending it. So there's no point of overkill in the back, what I'm saying. So it's very mismatched as far as power application. It's very gingerly to the rear and very aggressive to the front.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And that's really because you're not really shooting line on the back. You only want to shoot on the front. And you really kind of only need to get the head out, right?

Mac Brown: That's right. So all you try to do with it in back is just get it straight, get it lined up. And with it being that short, a lot of times what happens is there's a tendency to kick it to where it kicks. In other words, you go back, if you go just a little smidgen too hard, it's going to kick and turn into an L. So an L is going to be very inefficient to try to hammer it forward because then you got to waste half your stroke to straighten the L back to straight. So the key is, like I said, to throw it very. To figure out what gingerly is to keep it straight. No more, no less, but straight in the rear.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And in terms of running line, are we talking about something like OPST or something like that or kind of. What's the running line made out of?

Mac Brown: That's a good one. I've used that in the past. There's a lot of Germany that I like. And the problem with building these real heavy heads on a short running line is like everybody's thrown probably like an eighth inch jig or with crappie and that kind of stuff with a lead head jig. And there's a big difference as, you know, like 3-pound tippet versus 10-pound tippet. Which one goes much easier. It's the lighter tippet. And of course.

But the problem is with these heads when they weigh 300 grains and if you pick one at say 10 pounds, well, it'll just snap off. A lot of times you'll just snap it on the forward cast. Of course that doesn't do you any good. There's a company in Germany that makes this monofilament that starts off at like 30 pounds and it tapers very aggressively and quick. And I mean, it's really kind of cool. It goes fat to little, fat to little, fat to little for the whole 300 meter spool.

So you can build a whole bunch of shooting heads and then you splice that into like say 5 pounds or 4 pounds or whatever it is you want. Because you don't need a lot of really big stuff if you're trying to go great distances, you know, I mean you just need the big stuff where it attaches to the head so you got your little safety margin. So when you hit it, it's not going to snap to 30 pounds. And then 30, 40 feet in, it goes to the really light stuff that shoots to the moon. You know, that's how they throw it. Like, and the distances are so different.

Like we were talking about it before we started the podcast. I mean they're throwing close to 360 feet with these kind of arrangements. So it's not like forming a loop and throwing 100-foot cast. I mean we're talking about going way further than 100 feet.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, sounds like it might be a good place too to maybe hit that connection point with a little UV resin.

Mac Brown: Oh yeah, yeah. There's a lot of different splices and different ways to minimize the knots and that kind of thing. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. I mean I enjoy, I enjoy the. I don't do it as much as I should because I, right now I'm dry flying a lot. There's not a lot of demand throwing a shooting taper right now this time of year, but there's definitely times whenever you're in a situation where you're trying to reach a lot further out and there's no way to get there much. Just where it helps a lot for getting great distances.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, which I was going to say. I mean the use cases that I think of, I mean we were talking before we started recording and you're talking about all kinds of roll your own situations. But I think the common use cases that I think of are basically people fishing in the surf for like bluefish and stripers.

Mac Brown: Yeah, that's a big application to get past the breakers, you know, to get your lure out far enough and you see that a lot. Not so much in Carolina. Usually you see the big triangle pyramid lead weight and trying to throw out that big heavy piece of lead. But to be honest with you, the good shooting taper casters that are worldwide, they go way further than that big pyramid lead. Just because their technique is, you know what I mean?

I don't think, I mean this is kind of interesting when you think about, well, who taught them to throw, who taught them to throw it to the moon with a big pyramid piece of lead? I mean a lot of times they're self taught, or their daddy said just power it forward like put thumb on the back and push it forward. Well, even technique to fill that big hunk of lead is totally different than what a lot of them are actually doing, you know.

Yeah. So there's technique in that as well as shooting tapers. It's actually very, very similar technique. It's just that ones like from the tournament scene in Golden Gate and Long Beach and all the tournament clubs around the world. Of course their technique has been passed down for generations. So their technique is far superior because it's been an educational route rather than go figure it out, Marvin, if that makes sense.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. So, I mean, let's just say we're out striper fishing or fishing for blues. I mean, I would imagine your leader setup is probably like streamer fishing. Right? Probably level, pretty short. And if you're throwing at 300 feet, you probably should have a stripping basket.

Mac Brown: Oh, yeah, yeah. If you're going to try to do it like wading in water. Definitely. And there's a lot of new things out there of belts that have different loops that you can form. You know, I mean, to put them on different loops. I've made several of them out of coat hangers over the years, and there's a whole lot of new ones.

The best thing on a boat like, other than a wet towel, what works even better than a wet towel is to take some, like real heavy mono or even weed eater string, you know, the light weed eater string and just hot glue gun. Just take a bottom of a big plastic tub and cut off the sides, you know, maybe leave an inch off the sides and then put a whole bunch of those vertical just to help hold the mono because you got to strip out quite a bit of mono.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And I want to give a shout out to our friends at SA for generously sponsoring the series. And before we get to kind of our usual stuff, Mac was so excited with questions from last time. He's got a question this time, and if you want to throw it out there, we'll do the exact same thing we did before, you know, hit us back on Instagram and let us know the answer. And the first person that responds will win the line of their choice from SA. What do you got, Mac?

Mac Brown: Yeah, I thought a good question would be the difference of. We've talked forming loops for the last several series, like forming loops and having parallel legs and all the importance of that. I thought, well, with the shooting taper, it's a little different entity because we're talking about really projectile motion. And throwing a loop of line is not the same as projectile motion, of course.

So is the launch point. And what launch point means is where do you launch it at eye level, flat to the water surface or the grass or whatever you're throwing on versus the angle upward. The launch point, is it the same or is it very dissimilar from shooting tapers back to forming loops and talking about flylines where we form loops, you know, with weight forwards, double tapers that kind of thing.

So let's just get a question on that. It's basically a yes, no question. Is it same or is it different? And let's see what happens.

Marvin Cash: Are you feeling lucky?

Mac Brown: Yeah, but I think that'd be a good one for folks to kind of work through before they answer, because it'll help them kind of come up with their answer, you know.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And so, folks, you know, remember what we're doing. We love questions. And we've got one more episode. We're gonna talk about line maintenance, and then we're gonna have our big Q and A episode. You can email us questions, you can DM us on social media, and if you send in a question, we're going to enter a drawing for a signed copy of Mac's book Casting Angles.

And then if we select your question for the Q and A episode, you're going to enter a drawing to pick some SA lines of your choice. And so you're running out of time to win, and if you don't play, you can't win. So that's kind of all I know. What do you think, Mac Brown?

Mac Brown: I think that sounds like a great plan.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. Well, you know, hopefully, folks, we're on the other side of Labor Day. Think we got a little bit of heat and then it's going to start to cool off. We're going to be able to start to kind of get back to more of our trout fishing groove. And you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mac.

Mac Brown: Tight lines, Marvin.