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A week with Berlin!

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Paul Arden
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A week with Berlin!

#1

Post by Paul Arden »

Dude!!!

Well actually I'm hoping it's more than a week - anyway it's been quite a while, mate. I've been following you on Facebook - you're now in Canada and a fly fishing guide! Awesome!!!! It's great that you've been enticed to come back - we've had lots of changes but there is still a core here that you know :pirate:

What have you been up to, man? The last I heard from you is that you'd fallen off a pier and broken your leg! :sick:

Welcome back!

Cheers, Paul
It's an exploration; bring a flyrod.

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Tom Benson
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A week with Berlin!

#2

Post by Tom Benson »

Hi Carl ...... welcome back.
Tom Benson :upside: :D
Berlin
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A week with Berlin!

#3

Post by Berlin »

Mornin! :-) So there I was, Just sitting there in a grump, because the Steelheading was on fire and then we got a month long freeze with windchill temperatures of minus 30 (great for a sustained anchor for the casting by the way. You need a chisel to dig it out :-) ) when Paul pops up and says "Hey, can I borrow some socks"? Actually he didn't say that, but it's close enough :-)

So Here we are. It's probably a decade since I was really actively involved. So Whats been happening? What did I miss? :-)
Berlin
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A week with Berlin!

#4

Post by Berlin »

Yeah, the Pier thing. Not many people can fall of a pier and miss the water. it takes special skill. Its not so much flying as falling with style. :-) Turns out I'd made quite a good job of my right ankle what with it facing the other way and everything. It was also good news that my consultant for the recovery was a fly fisher. I had to explain to him that in about 5 weeks I had to be able to point my toe. On an ankle that was dislocated, fractured, now sported a fancy titanium plate and was the size of a melon. I needed to point my toe because I had to enter the casting comps at the CLA in the UK. And he was nice enough to come up with a special cast which was held on my Velcro straps so I could loosen them enough to point it for the explosion at the end of the cast :-) So There I was, stood in the middle of Thirsk horse racing course for about 4 weeks, on crutches, practicing for the CLA. Things were going well and if you gritted your teeth hard enough, you could get over 40 yards with a 8 weight.
And three days before the casting event, they cancelled it due to flooding. :-)
Its all healed now and I can't recommend enough, if someone has a long term niggle that causes them pain that they go and see a ROLFer.
Anyway, we should probably talk about casting and stuff. and rods, and inventions and the nuances of the white mouse and recoil control and all that good stuff. :-)
Berlin
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A week with Berlin!

#5

Post by Berlin »

I have to be honest here. i rarely touch a single handed rod now. i think I've used one maybe half a dozen times in the last few years. Living in Terrace, BC , everything tends to be huge so I've delved into the world of double handed rods to actually have any chance at landing anything with the size of the flies we use up here. Its been an interesting 4 years. Lots of Skagit, lots of Scandi and lots of experimenting and research. I didn't get Skagit when I first moved here. I'd never needed to cast in the situation where it was necessary... I thought. Looking back to times in the Scottish borders, there were dozens of times it would have been the set up to use, but there you go. There's a lot of times here where you're fishing with zero back cast. Actually, there's a lot fo times here when you have zero cast at all. Standing in a bush with just the rod sticking out and you have to hit 15 yards to get that steelhead, but you're already up to your nipples and the flow is washing you away. No wonder there's so many Skagit casts. The Perry poke is actually a thing because it needs to be a thing. :-)
Berlin
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A week with Berlin!

#6

Post by Berlin »

Its been a busy few years. I invented a rod with heated rings for fishing in minus 15 for Steelhead. I revised the Trebuchet system to make it infinitely variable instead of having fixed adjustment settings. (Trebuchet wasn't just about weighting the bottom of the rod so it was easier to cast. It was actually a method of tuning the secondary frequency of the rod so that whatever weight reel you used, the frequency of the rod was the same and so it always felt the same with any reel. It also allowed you to cancel out any tip bounce by adjusting the recoil rate with the dampening and make the rod feel sweet for whomever was using it and not for one particular caster. But that's very hard to get across in a half page magazine ad so its was just about the casting :-) )

I came up with a few flies for up here because as a fishing guide you haven't really got half an hour to tie and intruder so i came up with the 4 minute versions :-)

The book I was writing never seems to be done. Its written but you'll be standing in a river and then suddenly you realise you need a chapter on "overhang and skagit". Or you've discovered another use for the snap cast, and I need a decent graphic designer for the pics too. Hopefully a friend is coming over in Spring to film the casting DVD for it with his fancy drones and new 4K cameras. Maybe we'll be the first to get a 4K drone shot of being eaten by hungry, early season bears! :-)
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Lasse Karlsson
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A week with Berlin!

#7

Post by Lasse Karlsson »

Berlin wrote:Maybe we'll be the first to get a 4K drone shot of being eaten by hungry, early season bears! :-)
That would be an instant viral hit :D

Good to see you back here :)

Cheers
Lasse
Your friendly neighbourhood flyslinger

Flycasting, so simple that instructors need to make it complicated since 1685

Got a Q++ at casting school, wearing shorts ;)
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gordonjudd
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A week with Berlin!

#8

Post by gordonjudd »

It was actually a method of tuning the secondary frequency of the rod so that whatever weight reel you used, the frequency of the rod was the same and so it always felt the same with any reel.
Carl,
I know how hard it is to do the rod shop wiggle to excite the second mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl06xZDZZC4 with just the rod and not have variations in your excitation frequency cause the position of second node near the tip to move up and down the rod. Manually it is very difficult to maintain a constant wiggle frequency.

How are you exciting a second mode frequency that you can measure with a line and reel attached to the rod?

Since that second mode frequency is so dependent on boundary conditions it would seem to me that it will vary with different line lengths and/or reel masses. So how do you design the butt of the rod to make it insensitive to the mass of the reel?

Thanks for sharing your ideas. It is not very often that someone brings up the affect of the second vibration mode on casting.

Gordy
Berlin
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A week with Berlin!

#9

Post by Berlin »

Hey Gordon ! :-)
First of all, this is casting so lets make sure we're 1 talking about the same thing and 2) fill on other folks so they know what it is too.

Mel krieger's Wump, is the primary frequency of the rod.
The shop wiggle is the secondary frequency of the rod and
Compound curvature is the tertiary frequency.

We load the rod in the primary frequency and then unload it in the secondary frequency. (unless we're doing snap casts then its the third)

I started messing around in a Chinese factory when I was there and had access to all the stuff they had. I found a butt section of a rod that had washers in between the butt knob and the reel seat and just for shits and giggles added more and less washers and gave it a wiggle. It had a remarkable effect. Mick Bell was there with me so I showed him and that lead to the Trebuchet system.

In the days of yore there were folks that used to say stuff like "The best way to cast a rod is to take the reel off and out it in your pocket" Now these people had never actually tied this ( a bit like the people that say Fluorocarbon is less visible than mono. they never actuallys stuck a piece of each in a glass! :-) ) Because if they had they would have reaslised it feels terrible.
The reel acts as a "counter weight" or dampener to the rod when we cast. Each reel and how each reel is filled with different backing etc., makes a difference to the dampening. Take a Lamson (light) and an Abel (heavy) and put them on the same rod and suddenly the rod feels different. The dampening is different. So we came up with a system where you could add and subtract weight so a light reel would feel the same as a heavy reel. This was limited by the costs and complexity to having 4 weights that you could play with

Image

I'd usually have three weights inside the butt of the 13'6" model for the reel I used to use on it. To me, that was the right amount of dampening. It felt right. Now this gets a little more complex with double handed rods as the dampener (reel) is in between the hands and a double handed rod can be stopped with the top or bottom hands (giving two different dampening points)

When we go into a shop and do the shop wiggle, if you know what you are looking for, apart from just "feeling right" we can see if a rod is going to be better for roll casting or overhead, now it will work in the wind etc. Where the node is (the point that doesn't move) is and how much he tip oscillates compared to the middle tells you a lot about the character of the rod. but not many people know that (any?) :-)

So with the new system I decided to make it completely adjustable and infinite rather than being 4 settings. its not going into any rods anytime soon but the lash up prototype I made works a treat.

I'll get into this later in the week but I'm going to try and explain how I think about casting now and the three parts i exclusively concentrate on. Concentrating on these three means you don't need to worry about anything else in the casting stroke. More on this later.
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Trebuchet 2.0.png
Berlin
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A week with Berlin!

#10

Post by Berlin »

That's a nice video Gordon. i don't suppose you have one from the side view with the oscillation up and down do you?

The less grip you have on the butt the easier it is to have a repeatable shop wiggle. If you hold it loosely with only two fingers, once its in motion it takes almost nothing to keep it in motion. Its the old saying let the rod do the work. The less input we have the more the rod just does its thing. Because if we are gripping the rod in any way we are dampening it and thus, we have an variable effect on the rod as our grip strength fluctuates during the wiggle.
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