S5, Ep 85: Fly Line Essentials with Mac Brown

Marvin Cash: Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. We're back with the first episode of a new short series, Flyline Essentials, with Mac Brown. How you doing, Mac?

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

Marvin Cash: As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble. This is something we've talked about doing for a while and we're going to do a multi-part series kind of similar to what Jason and I did on Nymphing Essentials, but we're going to cover flylines and in a similar format. We were just going to start off with really just flyline basics. You want to kick us off?

Mac Brown: Sure, sure, I'll kick us off. Yeah, I'm kind of excited to talk about flylines. They make a big difference for what we're trying to do on the water, for sure. Depending on what kind of fly we're casting, what kind of fish we're pursuing, what depth the fish is, what tropics or cold weather - all those things become part of it. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to it.

I guess they come in a lot of different shapes and configurations and kind of to keep it real simple for tonight to start off would just be to talk about the different weights of line that people will use. So talking about that being the mass side of it, like we need to really kind of dial that in.

So then we also need to talk a little bit about projectile motion because most of the poles people use instead of a fly rod have been used to throwing just a chunk of weight at the end of it, whether that's a spoon or whatever that's on the end of it. And of course that's not how flylines work. When we're talking about flies and dry flies, we're talking about the line itself is the mass that's carrying that fly out and delivering. So yeah, I think that'd be good.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And so I guess what I would say is if we start and we talk about like line weights, and I know they're kind of a Hatfield and McCoy thing because it's kind of almost an irrelevant standard now. But the old way it was done was basically line weights were a certain amount of mass and a certain amount of the front of a flyline. You want to kind of recap that for folks?

Mac Brown: It's the first 30 feet. And of course I've never found out the answer to this, but I got a feeling I know the answer. But anyway, why would it be 30 feet? Because a lot of the - Myron Gregor is the one that did most of the stuff for the early AFTMA standards, who was a tournament caster out of San Francisco. Of course, Myron's dead now, so I didn't get to ask him this, but I think a lot of it has to do with why a furlong was a mile 5,280 feet, an arbitrary number, because the average Roman soldier was five feet tall.

So the rule of six, which is Snell's window. I know this is not about Snell's window, but here's my theory. About 30 feet, the average Roman soldier five feet tall, cast into a fish 30 feet away, needs to stay below 6 feet, which means the rod can't be vertical. So I believe that that's where a lot of this 30 feet came from. And I also believe it's because most casters that take this up, 30 feet is a reasonable goal for most people are going to be winter at 30 feet.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, because it's 30 feet plus 8 to 10 feet. A leader, right?

Mac Brown: That's right. With the flyline. So what that boils down to is that first 30 feet, like a 2-weight. Like, I love throwing 2-weights and 3-weights a lot. That means the 2-weight's going to be 80 grains of weight. Grains being just like if you're familiar with reloading bullets, gunpowder grain grains is a standard of measurement that we use - 100 grains for a 3-weight. Etc 5-weight be 140. You can look them up on the Internet, on Google if you want. But I know them all.

The standard was supposed to be. Now they've gone back in and kind of redone this, which makes it a lot more confusing. But the standard's supposed to be these numbers. So then they say plus or minus 20%, 15%, they get moving all around. Well, then it's not really a 3-weight, is it? If you're going to subtract 20%, you're back at a 2-weight. So it kind of confusing.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, yeah. But it's an interesting basis of reference. And so what I'll try to do is I'll try to find an image or a link to kind of one of the standard tables for how to measure line weights. And that's kind of the jumping off place. And when we start, we get deeper into the series, we can talk a little bit more about what that really means and how it relates to the way rods work.

But then as you also touched on, the big difference in general in fly fishing is you're throwing a fly that's very air resistant and very light, as opposed to like you said earlier, throwing a spoon or a plug or a jig.

Mac Brown: That's right. Like say a dry fly has actually air resistance, not weight, but more air resistance, which is like saying a flag flopping around on a flagpole. So when we take a dry fly, say like a hair wing Wulff style fly, say it's a Royal Wulff. I mean that's a fantastic fly. If you fish down in Oceania, like New Zealand, Tasmania, that's one of the better patterns you could throw down there on the vacation.

So that offers a lot of air drag because the way the calf tail wings stick up, they catch a lot of air, air resistance. So imagine trying to throw that on a spinning rod. That's not going to go anywhere. You got air resistance and you got very low weight overall of the fly itself.

So yeah, I mean, I think even flies - back when I got into this years ago as a kid, I was fascinated even about the - because it really does everything we put on a leader modify with flyline, the whole system has to be taken into account. So you think about the difference of the aerodynamics, say a parachute, which is one tiny post and it's like a Frisbee where the hackles wound up above the body. How much more air resistance in flight. What about an Elk Hair Caddis is very air resistant. It offers less air resistance. So all these things come into play. How are you going to turn it over, how much slack it's going to have? That's all part of the system.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, but at a really basic level, you got the way you solve that problem. As opposed to say conventional tackle where you really are using a really skinny line to basically make sure you can bring the lure back. You're actually in fly fishing. The general rule is the flyline has the mass and that's how you're solving that air resistant light fly problem.

Mac Brown: That's right. Yeah. Exactly. And so one of the things we don't want to go far off the deep end, we're talking about mass. But we got to talk about F equals ma. That was Newton's first rule. And I think that that really helps people. At first people go, I don't want to remember that, but it really helps you because it's just so simple.

What if we build Marvin, what if I build you a leader with chameleon, which is really stiff material, stiff monofilament if mass is reduced, what would have to change? Well, you'd have to use a greater acceleration. It's that simple. It's not like it's a complicated rocket science formula. It's like Common Sense 101 kind of formula.

So then what's the difference of say a 12-weight line at 380 grains compared to say a 3-weight at a hundred grains, it's almost four times as heavy. Does that make sense to what would go down if we're throwing the 12-weight, to throw that little parachute Adams, you wouldn't have to have much acceleration for the same 30 feet, would you? So that's kind of how it works. So that kind of gives us a baseline of understanding how do these lines with this different mass, how does it help us throw say a Clouser Minnow, what are we gonna need different for that? It's all interrelated.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And that kind of gets you to the acceleration part. And you and I have touched on it and we're trying to kind of keep this kind of simple. But if you say F equals ma, the reason you get that acceleration in the fly loop is, as a general rule, you are decreasing the mass because the loop is getting smaller as it unrolls. Right. And so that's right. So it accelerates because the friction and all these other things in the air are not dissipating the energy as fast as the mass is changing. And so what happens is the acceleration has to go up for the equation to work, right?

Mac Brown: That's right, yeah. As far as how the loop unrolls. So to keep it really simple would be saying if we break the loop down, just picture a candy cane at Christmas time. Say the little short part of the candy canes where the fly is. So there's the rod leg, we call one side the rod leg of the loop. Whether it's horizontal, vertical, I don't care where the loop is, it's still a loop. There's a rod leg that's attached to the tip of the fly rod. And as that gets longer, the fly leg has to get shorter. The fly leg is the part where the flies attach to the center of that candy cane. And as that fly leg gets shorter, it has to be speeding up so it's accelerating.

And that's the big difference in understanding loops. And that's one of the biggest differences in all the years guiding and teaching clinics and casting schools is people don't really appreciate the fact that that fly's accelerating. You can tell it to them, but it doesn't sink in because every time they think they're going to go 50 feet instead of 30, you'll see them using all this excess motion, excess wasted energy. They don't believe it's going to work. So they think they got to put a lot into it.

So the concept of acceleration has not been grasped until they do it with very little effort. So it's usually in casting, less is more. For that reason, less is more. You don't have to try harder and really throw it hard. It's not about that. You just put it in motion with a simple start and stop, the timing, with the right timing and the loop will do the rest of it, because it's kind of like a magic trick, the way the loop unrolls.

And I think that'll be good to talk about a little bit with projectile motion. And I think the reason that's tough for people to grasp is most things in sport are all projectile motion from guns, bow and arrows, golf, baseball, all the sports little boys are indoctrinated with, and especially boys, because they seem to struggle the most with the concept of acceleration over women is, everything in their world has been told if you do this harder, you'll get a bigger result. And so you can't really blame them. They've done a lot of sports.

But I think the projectile motion sports affect men much more, much greater than women. If you tell a woman it accelerates, she usually gets it pretty quick. You tell a guy that and he's still throwing his shoulder out a half hour later. So I think it's just the way they're wired.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. So it's a really kind of basic framework, and we're going to kind of build on that as we kind of go along. In the next segment, we're going to talk about, we're going to take a deep dive into cores and coatings on flylines and, like I said earlier, we have a very, very similar format to the series we did with Jason Randall.

And so we love questions. And so, first of all, we want to give a shout out to our friends at Scientific Anglers because they've generously donated some lines for us to promote the series. And what we're going to do is we love questions. You can email them to us, you can DM us on social media, and we're going to collect all of them.

At the end of the series, we're going to have a Q and A session and they're going to be two drawings, one drawing for everyone that submits a question. We're going to drawing for a signed copy of Mac's book Casting Angles. And then for the questions that we pull out for the Q and A episode, you're going to enter in a separate drawing and you're going to get to pick some SA lines of your own choosing, which will be cool. So depending on where you are and what you like to fish for, you'll have a chance to pick up a few lines from SA to make your time on the water a little bit more fun.

And what do you think about that, Mac Brown?

Mac Brown: Well, I think it's great. And thanks to our friends up there at SA with Brad and Joe and Eric and all of them for - I think this will be a fun little series to do because I think there's so much of it that we probably should have been say before we go that 90% of people still fish a floating line 40 years into their career as a fly angler, which tells you they never really appreciated the glass, the sweeps, all the stuff that we're going to be talking about coming up.

So I think that right there says it all. If they're still fishing a floating line that many years, they're not really appreciating the fact of what all these different lines and makeups for tropical and cold weather coatings and ridge lines versus smooth lines and all that, they're missing out on a lot of really neat things.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And we're gonna help you figure that out so that you can be more productive on the water, but also that you can be a more informed consumer because there are a whole lot more choices today than there were 20 or 30 years ago, for sure, right?

Mac Brown: Oh, yeah, yeah. The choices are much, much greater. And yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Marvin Cash: You know, so, folks, stay tuned. We're going to bring these to you every two weeks or so. And watch Instagram and other social media channels for the topic and be sure to send your questions in. And I know it's hot, so leave the trout alone and go fish for some panfish or something in the salt. And yield yourself to get out there and catch a few. Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mac.

Mac Brown: Tight lines, Marvin.