I hope my title doesn’t offend any “Pastafarian’s” but I couldn’t resist. I attended the Fly Fair of the Gulf Coast Council of the IFFF in Ocean Springs this past summer. It was a great event and I just love that it is in Ocean Springs, MS, near my redfish patch. Unfortunately the timing makes me choose between events at the fair and my favorite pastime, sight casting reds in the marsh from my kayak.
The days were sunny with fairly calm winds which made for great fishing. Friday I fished by myself and although I had a slow morning, things picked up when the sun got straight overhead. I went to one of my favorite grass beds that I call “green acres” and between the tide leaving about six inches of water above the grass and the grass filtering the water, I had visibility as good as one can expect near the Mississippi Sound.
I suspected fish would be in the flat so I just eased in and grounded the boat to let the fish come to me. It didn’t take long before I saw a fish cruising. I caught that fish and before I could set up again, another fish came by and I caught him. With that kind of action I figured I should turn the camera on and after I did, I didn’t use much battery before I saw a fish cruising between 60 and 70 feet. Since I could see almost 40 yards, I had loaded my stripping bucket with plenty of shooting line for just such a long shot. Though I needed the extra line for this fish, the extra line was almost my downfall. See what happens here:
See it again in slow motion and you can see how I was lucky enough to be able to pull out the spaghetti to make the cast. “Flying Spaghetti Monster” defeated, no offense to Pastafarians intended.
This helps me make a good point in that the less shooting line you keep in the bucket the better the chances are that the line will come out perfectly. I usually only keep enough for about a 40 foot cast. [Postscript: I have since added a line management solution by cutting the bottom of my foam bucket from another vendor, and fitting it to the bottom of the “Samurai” bucket. I still further enhanced it with some plastic tines as the foam “nipples” in the bottom just weren’t getting the job done. I now regularly load enough shooting line to make 70 foot casts. It is of course still a good idea to load only as much as the most common casts being made as any stripping bucket can produce a “flying spaghetti monster”, given the chance.]
Here is the end result from that cast:
"Samurai" Fly Shop 