to the casting Gods: what distance to reasonably expect?

[whinging pom]

Yesterday i decided when filling up my new motor to treat it to the better high octane stuff.. you know proper pamper it.
Only thing is the pump was for petrol and the new motor is derv!

the outcome was that i would have to wait two hours for the customised AA van to purge my car of all traces and fill it up with derv.
The garage was a grimm location, known locally for a famous murder and grizzly suicide.
it was going to be a long two hours.

However I did have the 5 wt TCR tucked in the back for such emergencies and a 5 wt MED shooting head. and there was a field of new barley growing with a strip along it. So I had an hour or so to practice on my carry and the get feel again... and it got me thinking?


You distance casters with 5wt line are hitting 120-150' in comp, but from what I understand with 8 or 9 wt rods, I think Nick mentioned he was using a 6wt igniter in cumbria. so what would you realistically expect on a 5wt blank with a 5wt line? ( Say aTCR with a MED or ballistic).

thanks.


(oh and the cost of my blonde moment was half a Hot Torpedo rod ..... and the ignominy of my car bannered off for a further two hours with bright orange signs shouting Fuel recovery "No Naked Flames" !!.

It might as well have stated " Prize Idiot Zone"!.....and on good friday afternoon and endless stream of cars crawling past , knowing exactly what i had done... the casting however was pretty good for me though).

so... How far do you go?
From the duffer of Simpleton W.Pom

[Lasse Karlsson]

Hi Pom

Back in the day, we where all using tcr590 or similar to throw the scintific anglers XXD line as far as possible. Then Bruce changed the XXD by making the back taper 5 feet longer, and we swapped lines.

I made a comparison some years ago, when the craze was that stiffer rods threw further and stuff. I said they don't and the one you use the most is your best bet for longest cast on average, not just picking up a broomstick and winning the WC.. stiffer means less counterflex, means less line pulled away from target. Even Paul is coming arpund to that I hear

Back to the tcr 590 and a MED 5 weight, personal best with that setup is 142 feet and change..

During the different rods thing, it looked ok too

Cheers
Lasse

[whinging pom]

Thanks Lasse that’s really interesting and good to know the potential of the set up. ( that the limiting factor is this particular jerk on the end) It’s good to know how much farther away the finishing line is!

So looking at your distances, and considering people are competing with eights or nine weights or whatever. we’re not looking at a radical step up in distances, more like pushing the margins.

In other words You wouldn’t be gaining 25% - 30% more like 8-10%
Am I reading the right ?
Pom

[Mangrove Cuckoo]

Pom,

What is derv? As a US owner of a custom van (25 yrs old) I'm just curious! Is that what we call "Diesel" over here?

BTW... casting the MED on a 8wt Scott Tidal I can hit 120' frequently. The rod has been discontinued due to being too slow for the more discerning modern caster, but I love it for its easy going nature. I can get a bit more from a HT 6wt, or at least more often, although I feel like I have to try harder with that rod.

Usual disclaimer: I am not a competition caster.

[Paul Arden]

Hi Pom,

If you take wind out of the equation then I would expect (hope for) 120+ and around 130 is a great cast. I set a BFFC record with that combination that stood until fairly recently.

I did that in France once, but the other way around (pump colours were different). A local mechanic syphoned it out (by sucking on the tube FFS). They didn’t charge me for the work but they kept the full tank of diesel. It’s something my mum does all the time…. I wonder if it’s hereditary.

Cheers, Paul

[whinging pom]

Paul
Have to admit wind perfect and being squeezed adjacent to a line of tall leyland cypresses would have helped it keep the wind and my tracking stay on line.

Mc

(It was supposed to be my first fishing trip of the year )

Yes it’s diesel . It’s standard over here for it to have a black hose and black head, ( and Diesel written on it !!! ) and petrol has a green hose and green head. This one had a black hose and green head.I just read the blurb of how much better it was for my engine with its higher something and my mind was wading in the cool waters of a not too distant trout stream.

It’s a Mercedes hybrid and there’s so many engine management sensors that as soon as they detect a problem shut the whole thing down. To make it worse it’s auto so I couldn’t push it. It let me drive just far enough to get across the entrance to the car wash area. I couldn’t even park up inconspicuously.

So for two hours I blocked everyone trying to get a car wash on a bank holiday afternoon. And in the breeze I was seeing a caddis called grannom fluttering around and I knew the trout would be going crazy a mile away at the stream.

I was so glad to be able to be shielded from the uncomfortable stares and sympathy, by a line of trees in a field casting my frustration out.
Not sure which emotion was driving me , embarrassed or self loathing, but there was no way I was noodling with accuracy casts and boy it drove those casts out ( by my standard) !!!
And no come back on the TE . It’s finally gone. I was actually sorry when the AA turned up to fix it, there was plenty I could feel I could fine tune.
It took him two hours further to mechanically pump it from both ends and swab out all traces. Before flushing another ten quid worth of diesel through it before starting the motor!!

This time last year I was practicing with an old soft 5wt , not doing great, but in the back of my mind not knowing how much further good casters would go with that set up… It’s like a choker on improving. That kind of thinking limits me.
Seeing the finish line is still a way off is really handy to keep me driven on to the next benchmark

So Thanks for the replies, and the opportunity to offload my woes
Pom

[James9118]

Hi WP,

I'm not as god-like as Lasse - my PB with a TCR#5 and a MED was 138ft. With a shooting head made from a MED I could occasionally go over 150ft also. I should probably go back and give this another go, my cast has changed quite a bit since those days.

James

[whinging pom]

Hi WP,

I'm not as god-like as Lasse - my PB with a TCR#5 and a MED was 138ft. With a shooting head made from a MED I could occasionally go over 150ft also. I should probably go back and give this another go, my cast has changed quite a bit since those days.

James

Hi James
I neither have the god given ability ......or enough running line and backing to make those distances!

Im intrigued if you can occasionally hit 138' with a 5 wt rod what actually is your margin of improvement with your competition weight rod for 5 wt??
( i know damn well you'll have analysed it to the nth degree).

Id get my 8wt out and try myself but i am so damn inconsistent that the figures would be so random and meaningless.

all the very best to you and your other three quarters

pom

PS Dont tell me you were hitting 150' with that shooting head that I'm practicing with at present..
that would be truly depressing

I dont know which way it sounds worse.........., Im 46' behind you, or I need to gain nearly 50%
....maybe next lifetime

[James9118]

Im intrigued if you can occasionally hit 138' with a 5 wt rod what actually is your margin of improvement with your competition weight rod for 5 wt??
( i know damn well you'll have analysed it to the nth degree).

Hi WP,

These are the results from the last time I ran the rod stiffness trial with a MED #5 line - all the rods were Sage TCXs, marked as #5, #7 and #10.

But as Lasse would point out, at this time I had been practising with the #10 rod and MED#5 for some time.

[Paul Arden]

There are a few ways of reading that. Generally in a competition, certainly in the time limit with the WCs you would expect to get that number of shots away. Slightly more actually. Since it’s the longest cast that counts the difference in distances is between 37.5 and 39.5 between all rods. Ie a 2m or 6’ distance.

James points out he was practising with the 10 for some time, but the first time I ever cast with a 10 rod/5’MED was in competition and I found the same — and I had been practicing with the 6 rod for 12 years.

2m when you are pushing 40m is not very significant. It’s very significant in comp. My belief is that the difference can mostly be accounted for at loop formation and by counterflex.

Cheers, Paul