Hi,
Sorry to interrupt your Monday evening.
For years I'd under-rated my fly line - rod, reel, flies, tippet - all fussed over to the n'th degree, all bought and treated with proper care.
The line? Usually, so long as it was rated the same as the rod, I didn't pay too much attention - or I chose whatever was the best value when I needed to by one.
An Autumn day in 2024 cured me of that.
I was on a low, clear(ish) stretch of my local Derwent, everything set up the way I always set it up, and I could not buy a take. Changed the fly four times. Changed the leader length twice. Started blaming the fish, the weather, my own casting - all the usual suspects.
It wasn't until a fellow club member stood on the bank and watched me put down the third good fish in a row that he said, quite bluntly, "it's not the fly, it's how it's landing." He was right. The line was doing exactly what it did all summer - just not suited to what the water was now asking of it.
That's the thing about autumn nobody tells you when you're stocking up on flies for the season: the conditions change, but most of us keep fishing the same set-up we had in May, June & July.
Here's what's actually different right now, and why it puts more pressure on your line than it's faced all year:
On Rivers: Levels start to rise a little, the water flows faster, and the fish that survived summer are the wary ones; the naive ones didn't make it this far. You need a longer, softer leader turning over properly, and a line that lands like a feather. Anything heavy-handed and you're casting to fish that clocked you before the fly hit the water. It's the difference between a good session and driving home wondering what you did wrong.
On Stillwaters: This is turnover season. The water's mixing top to bottom, temperatures are swinging by several degrees within a week, and the fish move about accordingly - deep one outing, cruising the margins the next, chasing whatever's comfortable that day. You're often changing depth and retrieve mid-session just to stay in touch with them, and your line is the thing that has to keep up without you rebuilding your whole rig every hour.
And for both: the weather itself is the real troublemaker. An October morning can go from flat calm to a stiff northerly by lunchtime, and a line that only behaves in one set of conditions leaves you either re-rigging on the bank or just not fishing properly for the rest of the day. I've lost count of the sessions cut short by exactly that.
None of that gets solved by a better fly, however good the tying. It gets solved by a fly line that's actually built for the conditions you're about to fish in - one that can flex across rod weights and casting styles without you having to think about it, session to session, water to water.
I've spent this whole of this season (and last) using one particular line that changed how I think about this, on rivers and now on stillwaters too, and I've genuinely not reached for anything else since. It's not the sort of thing that usually gets its own email - a fly line rarely does - but this one has - and you'll receive it tomorrow!
Tomorrow morning (at 07:30) I'll show you exactly what that line is, and why it's just as at home on a blustery Yorkshire stillwater as it is picking its way down a low stretch of the Derwent - and we've done a bit of a deal on them!
I'll tell you more at 07:30 tomorrow.
