The fly fishing expo season is in full swing. Simultaneously, someone up in Northern Manitoba decided to fire up the MEGA air conditioning unit and blasted us with the frigid fan for the last week. The wind chill had the northern states down into negative double-digit temperatures for a few days. I had the joy of attending a fly fishing show here in Wisconsin over the weekend. I arrived at the show around 7 am, and as I got out of my car the phone said that with the wind chill it felt like -39 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Luckily, I didn’t have to walk far, and I wasn’t carrying much with me. Interesting fun fact about -39 degree feels like temperatures, to me they don’t feel much different than 9 degree feels like temperatures. I’m not exactly sure at what temperature it is, but once things go beyond, “Wow that refreshing,” and into icicle nose hairs, and “My GOD man I need to run to the door,” you enter the Indoor Time. The Indoor Time doesn’t usually last too long up here. We usually get a few weeks of these sorts of temperatures during the winter months.

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I had a wonderful week with Marcel from Deutschland. Marcel is a really top bloke and one of my long term fly casting “students”. Marcel first got in touch with me earlier last year and sent a video of his distance casting, and I thought “this chap could be truly tremendous with some coaching”. And it’s true, he can and will be world-class.

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In this FP I'm going to get straight to the point immediately: I believe it's time that competitive fly casters ditch the ICSF and set up an alternative to the World Championships under another banner. I wasn't a big fan of the original decision for fly casting to join the ICSF at the competition in Estonia. Incidentally there was zero talk before the vote, or certainly none that I heard, about whether this was the right direction to go in, so no discussion about the pros and cons amongst the casters gathered, before it was put to a show of hands at the team manager's meeting.

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This week I thought another old saltwater pattern was in order and I've chosen a deadly one that sometimes doesn't get the love it deserves: The bendback.  Perhaps it's more of a style than a specific pattern, but the advantages of the style - and the problems some have with them - are fairly universal across all the different bendbacks.

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In fly casting we stop fly rods. We are not getting away from that, even with a stopless technique. The rod has to stop sometime and we seldom let the ground stop the rod. I’m not a huge fan of the “hard stop”, I think it causes more problems and confusion in most of the cases. The good stuff happens before the hard stop. I have also found another reason why the hard stop is bad and that I have been a bit wrong in a previous FP and missed something important in the FPs about elbow pain.

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Finally, feet on the ground in LA. It was touch and go getting my “Fit to Fly” certification from docs in Cambodia. In the end I enlisted an old friend and her daughter, both excellent physicians, and they, with the open and collegial cooperation of a Cambodian internist, went over all the data and decided the likely problem was due to mechanical trauma resulting in a burst Baker’s cyst. So much for any radical interventions or delays returning home. During the 15 hour leg from Singapore to LA, I performed my stupid little dance movements hourly in a narrow walkway between the two banks of restrooms mid-plane. I landed in fine fettle with almost a bounce in my step, feet relatively slender and beautiful. No clots. Customs was a breeze. Global Entry gets more efficient every time I travel. Almost no holdup at all taking 2 or 3 minutes, tops, waiting in line. Easy peasy - then home.

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