Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Friends with Boats Weekend!



Today is a travel day for the staff of FlyFishMagazine.com. We are heading out for our yearly celebration of "friends with boats" weekend. We all know that the only thing better than owning your own boat is having a friend who owns one and doesn't mind ferrying your sorry hindquarters around.

This year we will be joining Ron "long arm of the law" Barnes, for what we hope will be a visit to the Roanoke River striper run. Initial reports are good and the weather is looking to be excellent. This will be my first trip out with the new 9 wt rod (wishful thinking) so I am looking forward to casting into water and not lawn.

This will also be my first shot rockfish in a river setting. I think that my efforts might be hampered by the fact that I only have an intermediate sinking line. The experts all indicate that if the water is up a fast sinking line is needed in order to get to the bottom as quickly as possible. I just couldn't quite make it to the store for a new line so I intend to improvise my way around this by using some nifty crimp on bullet weights. I am hoping that these will sit close enough to the fly to avoid the usual problems with the chuck and duck but still not impact their rockfish appeal. I'll let you know how these work. With any luck the flows will be down and then 1.5 ft per second sink rate on my line will be enough to put me in the strike zone and on fish.

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