S5, Ep 90: 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 Fly Lines Essential with Mac. This time we're talking about cores and coatings. How you doing Mac Brown?

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

Marvin Cash: As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble. Last time we covered fly line mechanics and this time we thought it'd be a good idea to kind of do an overview of cores and coatings. When I think about fly line cores, I think about basically monocore lines. Usually it's Dacron or something like that. They extrude that PVC or coating on it. You want to tell folks kind of how that works?

Mac Brown: Yeah. What happens is depending on temperature. So you have like tropical conditions where you want to have it kind of blows around like a slinky on the bow. So a lot of those tropical lines they'll use a mono solid core.

And then the ones we use in colder weather, they're actually like the Chinese finger trick. A lot of them are actually mono that's braided like a really fine mono, that's braided like the Chinese finger trick, hollow inside. That's usually what the inside cores. And then we also have the solid mono quite a bit for cold water as well.

When we're talking about any kind of a sinking line, they put all those tungsten impregnated lines usually on a solid monocore.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, got it. I guess the real trick right is that when it's hot, those coatings get soft like everything else that's made out of plastic when it gets really, really hot and a boat deck's hot. So you need that extra kind of stiffness in the core. Otherwise your fly line would collapse and it would be incredibly hard to cast.

Mac Brown: That's right. And then the coating itself will be made specifically for warmer temps or colder temps as well. Because a lot of the colder weather lines in the tropics would get like really gummy and sticky. Not sticky so much through the eyelets, but sticky on the rod blank. That's what really happens as it goes out like when you shoot line.

It's the rod itself that really is the brakes. If you got a line that's getting gummy, it's not just the little tiny friction that's on those eyelets. I learned that when we did all those line studies at Western and we would shoot lines through photographic time gates and we had oscilloscopes and strobe high speed cameras with a strobe light and we could see how many times it was touching blanks going out.

That was a really interesting thing for me because I didn't know it and it wasn't taught in the industry. Nobody told you how that worked before. So it was kind of fun having all those toys in the material slab to play with.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. A lot of times you'll see those fly lines referred to as tropical lines and they'll label them cold water. But I think the place that this comes up the most is someone who's maybe traditionally a trout fisherman goes down to the Bahamas and takes some kind of line that's not tropical or the other time I kind of see it is if you're a smallmouth angler this time of year and it's in the 90s, kind of hard to make it work with a cold water line.

Mac Brown: That's right, yeah. Just they take them to those different extremes and they just don't perform the same and it's really interesting. Like those cores with the different plastics, that's what SA before had all the access to the subsidiary with 3M. So then you have like the best chemical engineers in the world.

So when they wanted to work on different recipes for those coatings, they had like some of the best chemists in the world to be advisors on that. So that's what I think that really separated them over time just they could go and say, hey, we want this and they'd come up with a recipe that would work for those different climate changes.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, I think the coolest thing, and it's not just SA now but when they put a coating in their line, it's actually not on the surface. It's like built into the line all the way through. So when you use those cleaning pads and kind of micro abrade that line, you're actually bringing that coating back to the surface. So it's a little bit different than the old days where you had to wash your fly line and then grease it and your line was greasy with mucilin or something like that.

Mac Brown: Oh yeah, like that AST technology is really amazing. Those little pads that you drag it through, that's really. I look back when I was a kid just with all of the buckskin, it used to be like the classic buckskin double taper or weight forwards. It's like, my gosh, fly lines have jumped leaps and bounds over the years and now they're just so much more, so much better for longevity as well.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. If you take care of them, they do last a long time. I guess one of the other things from a kind of a coating perspective is we... I think maybe gosh was probably the shark skin lines by SA. I think maybe airflow did the ridgeline lines. But you want to talk a little bit about the difference between like why you would want a smooth fly line versus why you'd want a textured fly line.

Mac Brown: Yeah, that was also at Western. That's where that actually started to come from early on I think is we did a lot of that with dropping a... I forget how heavy it was. It was measured in grams. But we dropped it off of a 10 story building over and over with all the different fly lines that were manufactured back in the 90s, early 90s.

And then I got to thinking a lot of the boats, a lot of the race boats up here and kayaking for like Olympic paddle sports through Tom Gates, which was in the paddle world for a long time. Like on the hulls of the boats. They started dimpling the boats. And then what happened with that is the same thing as dimpling on golf ball.

So I started thinking, well, we were doing all these line studies, dropping these weights off and measuring how fast they'd fall through photographic gates. And I kept thinking, well, if these things had a coating and we're ridged, what it would do is prevent one for form drag, skin drag on the fly line as it turns over. But more importantly, the line slap that we talked rod, the rod blank. That's what was putting the brakes on.

So there was a lot of lines that we tested and they were all over the spectrum. They weren't even close. So you think the rate of gravity is the same. Right. So you drop out all these different lines. You'd have some lines falling through much faster than others. But then I realized right then it could still be better if they had textured.

So when those early textured lines come out, now there's ridge lines. The sharkskin was a very early prototype of those when they came out and then they got popular for the saltwater scene. But it makes a world of difference also in just reducing the amount of line slap onto the rod length. That was helping to stop the overall line speed.

Of course, all the distance records got shattered once that stuff came out because it was the way to go when you look at the world events in the last few years in Malam, England and then Norway this last year, I mean they're way further now than they've ever been with the 5-weight distance competition. We'll just pick one thing. So there's a whole lot of things in a world event that they do, but let's just look at one specific thing because a 5-weight's kind of the holy grail in North America that for the average person that's gonna fly fish, that's what most of them start out with. A 9-foot 5-weight.

Well now those distances are up around 144ft. However, in the old days that that same distance before those came about would have been in the low 130s. So that's the difference it's made.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. So when you talk about rod slap, you're talking about there being effectively less surface area of the fly line to touch. So that's how that helps that problem. How does the dimpling or the texturing of the fly line help the loop unroll?

Mac Brown: I don't know. I mean, that's an interesting question because like a golf ball, I mean, yeah, they did it on that to help it maintain its spin in the air. That's hard to prove. I mean, I don't know. Because we can't. It's hard to separate that.

When we look at these distance cast like in the worlds now and think, okay, like Norway had some really impressive at that tournament there. There was a Norwegian that threw 144ft, which is just that really shocked me like for a 5-weight, because I've watched that jump in the last 30 years and it's part of it for casting. Casting Technique. I think there's a lot of casters that are better, better world class casters and techniques changed in casting as well. But I also think a lot of it's gear related.

And so. No, I think the gear is a big part of it as well is the lines are better. So I don't know. I mean I just look back as a kid where everything was either you bought a double taper, you bought a 30 foot weight forward. That's all that was available when I was a kid. I'm 60, so when I say a kid, that was a long time ago. But I mean there wasn't a whole lot of choices back then, Marvin, is what I'm trying to say. You either bought a buckskin 30 footer or you bought a 90 footer double taper. Does that make sense?

Marvin Cash: Yeah, it does. So if you're a consumer and you walk in a fly shop, what should be the decision point for you if you're just like, well gee, should I get a texture line or should I get a smooth line?

Mac Brown: I would get a textured line. I like the texture a lot better and it's getting harder to find. Like the DT lines are almost obsolete, I mean because there's only a couple of them made now. But I mean, I don't really understand why that is, to be honest with you. I don't know. You'd have to ask the industry that answer. But I don't know why that is.

But I'm still pretty partial to the DT lines. It's like Steve Rogers told me back years ago, close to 30 years ago, he says if you want to play for distance on the saltwater flats or distance just to improve your casting, he says hold a 90 foot double taper at the backing and learn to false cast that. And it's like you can't really do that with a weight forward with 30, 40ft ahead, can you? So the more rare they become, the harder that is to even practice that because there's not many of them made, you see.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, but you would generally prefer to have a texture line over a smooth line.

Mac Brown: I would, yeah. I think they're superior for when you shoot them, when you let go and it's hard to prove what it's doing in the air. I Do think it helps? Yeah, you asked me what I think. Does it help or hurt? But absolutely, it helps it. But how Much would be very hard to prove because for the other factors, the cast, it's hard to have the same exact consistent cast for anybody, even a world class caster. They're going to hit so many good ones and there'll be some that they wish were better, but nobody's like a robot and sit there and throw all of them the same.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. I guess one thing too with the texture lines is you just kind of have to keep in the back of your mind that you're going to probably have to clean them more frequently. Right. Because they generally, particularly if you're fishing in dirty water or scummy water, because they just have a tendency to pick up more stuff.

Mac Brown: That's right. That's right. And all fly lines. I mean. Yeah, because the meniscus up in the water film, that's where all the contaminants are. And I learned this back when I got out of college, like hiking the AT and I did the Pacific Trail. Most of the contaminants, a lot of people don't know this, but when you fill a water bottle up and you're backpacking and you want to get the cleanest water, you never want to scoop that up off the surface. The surface is where most of the contaminants because naturally, as things fall out, the meniscus holds most of the contaminants.

So you fill your water bottle up six inches a foot underneath the water surface. So all the dirt, like even on any river in the world, all the stuff that you're wanting to keep off your lawn is actually up there in the film. So you just want to give it a good cleaning. Just paper towel, ivory soap, water. Just clean it first before you're going to use it. And I find that to be one of the biggest things over the years in the water guiding with people is people don't really ever clean their line. You really need to clean your line every time you go.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And it's pretty easy to do. I mean, there's some videos. I'll see if I can find the link and drop it in the show notes. But if you just take a wash bucket and put a little ivory soap in it, don't want to use dishwashing detergent or anything harsh. Don't Use car detergent or anything like that because literally pull all the oils out of your fly line. But if you do that, it's an easy way to wash it. Right. And then you just rinse the bucket out multiple times and pull it. I pull it through an old undershirt and you're ready to go. So, that's it. I mean, that's how I do it.

Mac Brown: Well, that's a huge difference for shooting too. Like what you were talking about shooting a minute ago. A dirty line. A good caster, I promise you this, a good caster can tell instantly in the first shoot that this line is totally trashed with till you follow me. Because if it doesn't shoot, they know it's not them. And so they know right away this line starting, which is really common. So then they clean it and all of a sudden 20, 30ft shoots further just because they cleaned it. So that's what I think. A lot of the people that fish that don't clean their lines don't realize that there's all this potential in suitability just because they're not cleaning their lines. Yeah, but it's hugely important.

Marvin Cash: Absolutely. And folks, we love questions at The Articulate Fly. And we're doing this series very similar to the way we did the one we did with Jason Randall on Nymphing. DM us your questions, we're going to collect them at the end of the series, we're going to have a Q and A episode.

And the way it's going to work is if you submit a question. Easiest way to do it is to DM us on Instagram, but you can hit us up on any of the social media platforms or shoot us an email. If you send in a question, we're going to enter you in a drawing for a signed copy of Mac's book Casting Angles. And then if we use your question on the Q and A episode, we're going to draw and you're going to get to pick the SA line of your choice. So kind of a cool thing and really appreciative of the folks at SA for supporting the series.

And I think the next topic, Mac, we're going to actually start breaking down the different types of fly lines, like weight forward and all that sort of stuff. So that ought to be a really good episode. And folks, if you haven't yet, you should subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss them and subscribe. Even though it's know probably where you are, it might be a good idea to either fish early or late for trout or leave them alone and go chase bluegill. But yield yourself to get out there and catch a few. Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mac Brown.

Mac Brown: Tight lines, Marvin.