Tippets: Winter Snowpack, Casting Mechanics, The Fly Fishing Itch

January 20, 2014 By: Erin Block

  • Early season snowpack reports are in, reports The Idaho Statesman. “Early indications are it will be very dry in the western part of the West, but wetter as you travel east,” says NRCS Hydrologist Tom Perkins. “There are some exceptions to this, as New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Utah and southern Colorado are also expected to be dry.”
  • Marc Fauvet digs deep into the mechanics of casting in a display of stiff vs. soft rod action, countering the adage that you need to change the casting stroke with rod action.
  • Caught by the River offers a look back at one of naturalist and journalist John Hillaby’s essays on fishing, in “The Itch to Use a Fly Rod.”   “The way a good rod first flexes and then extends its muscles as the line quickens, tightens, rises off the water and does figure eights in mid-air is one of the miracles of humanly applied dynamics,” writes Hillaby. “It never ceases to amaze me.”