The Board

I am going to put on some new wool for the next BFCC trout accuracy comp this weekend.

What color do you think is best visible?

Cheers, Bart

Hi Bart,

I think that partly depends on the colour/shade of the grass and also I suspect our eyes (I’m a little bit colourblind between blue and green for example) and possibly the colour of sunglasses we are wearing at the time as well. I think it might be quite individual – and it would be very interesting to experiment with this, particularly if many people were involved.

I’ve played a bit with the difference between different colour lenses and Polaroids or not, over water. In fact in one competition this cost me first position because I was on the platform sunglasses up/sunglasses down while gauging the hover at the beginning of my time. Went around and was in first equal score position. But because of my sunglasses up/down experiment I was the slower of the two to finish

Cheers, Paul

Best colour depends on several factors, most important, the background colour. Use a contrast to that, preferably in a fluo version. Different coloured lenses on sunglasses can enhance contrast too.

Cheers
Lasse

Hi Bart,

You should definitely use camo-wool. I think you should ignore the targets and use the 5 mins to demo your distance casting. You could also practice mends around the targets. You should do this after downing 6 pints of bitter just to show it's still possible to cast well when drunk. If you want any more competition advice then let me know

Looking forward to catching up at the weekend,

James

Thanks for the advice guys.
Looking forward to the weekend.

Cheers, Bart

Hello Bart,
This may be too late for that particular competition, but there will be others.
In the ACA, we only have "approved flies" in yellow and white. So maybe I am biased because of that, but I thought that those colors cover most circumstances. That's until I experimented with Chartreuse last year and found that it actually equals or beats out White in at least a few different settings. The real lesson I want to pay forward is: We always have yellow and white (and now Chartreuse) ready to go and spend a few minutes before the actual competition to check those against the background (while wearing whatever glasses are best for us for other reasons). With a loop-to-loop connection to the tippet, it doesn't take long to try out all colors. A shortcut may be to look at other people's flies and see which of those are best (or worst - for elimination) in terms of visibility (while they are trying out their flies before the competition).
Personally (with my astigmatism), I always prefer the brightest flies possible. Hence, red, blue, green, orange, ... typically don't come close to be used by me - unless they have a fluorescent aspect to them.
Henry

Are there no LED flies yet?

Hello Alan,
Yes, there are - but the batteries are still too heavy.
Henry

HenryM wrote: ↑Tue Jun 20, 2023 12:25 am Hello Alan,
Yes, there are - but the batteries are still too heavy.
Henry

Okay, but hear me out: what if we put batteries into the fighting butt of the rod and ran a thin strand of copper all the way through the fly line, and superglued the copper thread to the mono leader and tippet... mean, what could possibly go wrong?

I thought of that (believe it or not). But the rules say "monofilament" leader, which prohibits copper wires.
We could microwave the power to the fly...
Well, if we are willing to do that, then we could also just put up a spot light (maybe an invisible UV spot light).