Planned a nice day on the pond with Sana, but we left home about an hour later than I had hoped. There were hardly any open spots around the pond by the time we arrived.. only 40 minutes past the opening hour at 7am. I casted for Sana; she took over rod duty once the line was on the water. Some space finally cleared on the platform after one of the local tournaments ended, so we could fish side-by-side.
As we talked about leaving, I told Sana I would catch one more fish before we called it a day. Ten minutes turned into two hours. For the first hour and a half, I missed about a dozen strikes. They kept biting, and I kept missing. Very confused. When I finally took a closer look at my hook, I saw that the bottom half of the hook had broken off. I had been dangling a hookless marabou fly in front of the fish. The constant strikes had me thinking that my hook set was the problem.
Tied on a new fly and gave myself five more casts. Caught the nicest fish of the day on the last cast. Check your hooks John.
Other lessons:
1) Scratch my previous comment about wanting a cheap 3wt for the pond. Two of the fish I hooked today put a deep bend in my 6wt and had me second guessing my forearm strength. The first one ran on me really hard and unspooled more line than I had ever let loose. zzzzziiiiiipppp... Beautiful music!
2) I am terrible at casting weighted flies. I do fine with an egg pattern, but once I tie on a heavier beaded flies, my line whips all over the place. Need a lot of practice on the lawn with my 6wt. There will be a lot of days on the pond this winter.
Need to keep this book on loan from Soboro for a few more weeks..
back to the basics, again