Morsie
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Yep I’ll be in Cressy Andrew, looking forward to catching up with Paul and as usual everyone else. Are you coming down? I’ll be there on the Wednesday, hope to go chasing southern bluefin the following week, down at Pedra Blanca.
Peter
Sage 2560. I had a Hardy Perfect. Inherited it from grandfather. I slipped on a rock and landed on it – shattered the frame like glass. I find Hardy reels too noisy. The sound of that ratchet is like a chainsaw.
Morsie
Zach, I had planned to come this year but this new book has eaten into all my writing and earning time and until its out I’m on bread and water. I’ll aim for 2011 with all the very best intentions of being there.
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Brad you did read me wrong. What I’m describing is my own journey through this thing and I’m asking you to ask yourself if you understand and know those basics just as I had to when I thought I knew a lot and found out I really didn’t. Perhaps the hardest part of the whole thing is confronting what you don’t know when you think you’re pretty good. I had to work with MCCI’s here who are much younger than me and have a fraction of the experience I have, but they had the determination to become MCCI’s and as a consequence were far better casters than me – but I had to deal with that. I always found a lot of reasons based on this stuff (ego) to not do it and those reasons tended to overshadow any reasons for doing it. I had to move that balance. It reminds me of some Bob Dylan words “Swallow your pride, you will not die, its not poison”.
JT, I’m in Australia, its the same size as the US with 5 MCCI’s and about 20 CCI’s. We all live many hundreds of miles apart but manage to get together several times a year. If you want this thing enough you’ll find ways of getting around and mixing with instructors. Our guys also travel to the US to mix with instructors because they feel its important. When I was last there I travelled from Idaho to San Francisco to spend time at the Golden Gate casting ponds with several MCCI,s and they travelled several hours to spend time with me and I was a CCI studying to be an MCCI at that stage. Get yourself to Yellowstone for the Conclave, mix with other instructors at every opportunity, become all ears and above all get Bill Gammels DVD of the 5 essentials. That’s at the core of it all. The effort is worth it.
Morsie
Brad, what do you understand about the true internal workings of fly casting? Can you explain to me what causes a tailing loop and can you correct this fault? Can you demonstrate wide open loops tight loops and tailing loops on command as though you were showing a student and explain how you created those different loops? Can you explain to a client how to better deal with the wind or a big heavy fly or a sink tip line? Its one thing to be able to DO this, its another thing to be able to explain, demonstrate and teach this.
I was a fly fisherman with 35 years of experience in an incredibly diverse range of fisheries and with an awful lot of teaching under my belt. I have lived and breathed the sport all those years. I would say I am a very experienced fly fisherman who THOUGHT he knew a bit about teaching casting and the mechanics of casting. I can’t tell you how humbled I was the first time I encountered a couple of FFF MCCI’s, I mean really humbled (Chuck Easterling, Lasse Karlson, and Soon Lee) – but not intentionally by them, by the realisation of how little I really understood the pure nuts and bolts of fly casting – not the urban mythology of fly casting as passed on by the ‘club expert’, just the facts.
Anyone who fly fishes and has aspirations to teach or is in a situation where they are constantly engaged with people who fly fish – whether its in a capacity as a fly shop assistant or guide, or club casting instructor, should at least achieve a CCI level of instruction. It is priceless.
The one thing you will learn is to deal with not knowing something.
Morsie
Peter Morse MCCI
Very timely topic as I work my way through a couple of hundred B&W conversions…….. Will download the Nik software and play with that.
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Going down this path right now with a new book. My two previous books were published by publishing companies and I received a royalty cheque which in the end was 3 tenths of five eight’s of sweet FA.
This time round its ALL MINE. The risks, the funding, the stress, the design, marketing etc etc etc. Turns out its a very big project with a lot of work involved – but I think in the end with complete control over the final product I’ll have something to be really proud of.
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Shane the two are quite different.
Multi-tip lines have the front section of the head as replaceable. This means you have a loop to loop connection in the belly section of the line and essentially you change the front of the belly and the forward taper, the rest of the line remains the same. This replaceable section is usually around 15 feet long and of course they come in a wide range of densities – think various density interchangeable sink tips.
A shooting head on the other hand is around (usually) 30 feet long and is attached to a thin shooting line usually also with a loop to loop connection. You change the entire head when want to change. Of course there’s no reason that you couldn’t have a shooting head that also has a ‘versi-tip’ set-up.
Shooting heads really are for distance casting, versi-tips are for versatility with what is essentially a standard length and tapered line. You would cast them quite differently.
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Man that kind of discourtesy pisses me off. Depends on what kind of relationship you can see yourself having with them in the future. If it means nothing to you take the opportunity to ring the editor and give him a lesson in communication and bad manners.
Tim Clark Reid is in your area somewhere on the North Island. He had a big hand in getting Sage to introduce a 12 weight into the budget Flight range. He uses it all the time on kings, call him up.
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Simon I think that if you submit a piece to multiple editors you will very quickly find out that no editors will touch your work.
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Plenty of reference to colours and possible combinations with colour plates Dave, just the tying sequences in B&W so they can be included in the right place.
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I have discovered B&W conversion functions in Lightroom and has resolved any issues, just need to get used to it.
In my case why black and white?
Cost of printing and book layout. This new book has fly tying sequences that I want to run in the appropriate chapters. To print them in place in full colour is expensive – colour images will be confined to plates printed in blocks and there will be plenty of them, I have to edit more than 700 back to 70 ffs. I also want the tying sequences to be in B&W so tiers aren’t distracted by all the colour there is in some of these flies, I want them to focus on the pattern and the method, not the colour – if that makes sense.
Its an interesting exercise, certainly a lot different from shooting outdoors in mostly natural light.
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Tim the fish will hold their condition and will still be tuned into seeing mice even after they’ve died out or moved on. Simon actually sent me the pics so I won’t post them here but I hope he will.
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I have seen some pictures of some sickeningly huge trout caught this year. Be there in 2 weeks with a box of meece flies.
Look for anywhere the beech forest meets the water. I have a personal rule about never posting locations so the rest is up to you, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Fiordland is a good bet.
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Dusty it does, I was looking at that this morning and thought I would ask a little first ……… maybe I need to play with that first, so many tools, yet so few fully functioning brain cells left……..
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