Devin Olsen and Jack Arnot on Competitive Dry Fly Fishing (Traveled #44)

WFS 922b Transcript 00:00:00 Dave: At the highest level, dry fly fishing isn’t about matching the hatch, it’s about controlling everything else. Today, we’re discovering what that actually means from how team USA approaches leader design and casting to why their dry fly system looks nothing like what most anglers are doing on the water. Today, I’ve got Devin Olson and Jack Arnot on the podcast, two of the top competitors gearing up for the World Championships this year in eastern Idaho. And they’re going to be breaking down exactly how they fish dry flies when it matters most. This is the Traveled podcast series where we bring you the best places to fish in the West, and the stories of how this region became what it is today. Devin and Jack are going to talk about the Spanish dry fly system and how it eliminates drag and visibility issues. We’re going to find out about why a long leader, nearly twenty feet changes everything, and why it’s very critical to have this exact system. We’re going to get into the key of creating a true dead drift without constant bedding. And why? Simple and impressionistic flies outperform exact matches. We also talk about how they’re preparing for the upcoming championships, and the small adjustments in casting and positioning that separate good from great anglers. Today’s episode is presented by Visit Idaho and Yellowstone Teton Territory, home to some of the most diverse and wild trout waters in the west. If you want to find Devin, you can head over to the Tactical Fly Fisher Shop online. You can check them out at YouTube. You can find Jack on Instagram, Jack or not. And we’ll be lining up everything for you here with team USA if you’re interested. This is a big one. We’re going to talk about the whole thing, how you can get involved as well. Here they are. Jack and Devin. How you guys doing? 00:01:43 Jack: Good. Good. Happy to be here. Thank you for having us. 00:01:46 Devin: Fine. Thank you. 00:01:47 Jack: Awesome. 00:01:48 Dave: Well it’s exciting to have you guys on here. This is a big year as right around the corner of the World Championships in Idaho in Idaho Falls this year you guys are going for you know hopefully a big win. I think it’s interesting. I’m excited to hear how this goes because you guys are obviously two of the big players, kind of the starters out there. We’re going to talk about a little bit on dry fly fishing today. I think that’s something that’s very misunderstood. I think a lot of people think of competition. They think you’re nymphing, right. It’s like I heard some joke about Lance was saying that he’s tired of people thinking of him as just a, a Euro nymph. Right. Almost getting mad. But I feel like dry fly fishing is totally misunderstood. So we’re going to jump into that today. But take us back real quick, you guys. Where are you at now with Mase? Right around the corner. Are you guys like prepared, ready to go for this thing? 00:02:30 Devin: Well, we’ve been doing, uh, sort of our first spring competitions of the year over the last few weeks. I actually just got back from a couple that I hosted over the weekend, and then we have, uh, two more sets of competitions coming up in May in Idaho on some of the venues that we’re working on for the World Championships. We did our national championship there last year and another series of regional competitions there as well. So yeah, we’ve been trying to prepare by competing on the waters that we’re going to be fishing on. And then we have a team practice that’s coming up in early June where we’re all meeting out there to to do the same. And I’m sure there’ll be more that pop up on the schedule throughout the summer on the venues as well. But the biggest thing right now we have going on is that, you know, we’re here in the historically driest and warmest winter in the history of the United States or in the Western United States. And, uh, so it could throw a few loops in the mix as far as needing contingency plans and stuff like that for venues. 00:03:29 Jack: So yeah, and I’m, I’m kind of in the same boat. Um, I haven’t started full swing of, of competitions yet here in Colorado. Um, it’s nice to take a little bit of a break from a rather busy schedule. Um, but doing lots of fishing and trying to just make sure it’s all pointed towards, uh, our world championship this September. Um, and also just trying to figure out where I’m going to go with all this low water may not be as much fishing as I want this summer. 00:03:59 Dave: Yeah. No, definitely. This is one of those years that we, uh, I think everybody, the whole West. I mean, it’s definitely the snow packs are way down. Yeah. We’ll kind of keep our fingers crossed that things come together here, but, um, let’s talk dry fly fishing, and maybe we can just start off the top, you know, right from, you know, I think the general people out there fishing don’t kind of understand what you guys are doing. So where do you start with this? If you’re trying to explain how you guys do your dry fly fishing, how it’s different than maybe just your typical, you know, dry dropper that you hear a lot about out here? 00:04:27 Jack: Yeah, I think I’ll start with single dry fly fishing. I mean, for Devin and I in competitions, I think anytime you are focused on just fishing a single dry fly, it takes a lot of focus and it’s usually not something you’re busting out when fishing is going really well. Um, like let’s say if Devin and I are having very good sessions on a river, uh, the nymph fishing is, is easy. You know, life is good, but there are a lot of sessions. Typically, we kind of see it sometimes later in sessions. 00:05:01 Devin: fourth or fifth session of the championship type of thing. 00:05:04 Jack: Yeah. And they’ve been nymphs into oblivion. And, uh, that’s where the fishing really starts to change. And so that for me is kind of where, uh, it’s separating, you know, mediocre anglers from expert anglers because it does, I think it takes a lot of skill to commit to a single dry fly, uh, during a session, maybe when things are not going very well. And I’m sure Devin has plenty of stories to maybe touch on that as well. 00:05:31 Devin: Yeah, I guess maybe since a lot of people tend to want this, let’s get into the nitty gritty of maybe how our rigging and our presentations are different than standard off the shelf strategies you might have. So really, when it boils down to it, there’s a couple of things we’re trying to defeat with most dry fly presentations, regardless of the type of method. Number one, we want to, you know, get a drag free drift, right? That’s what we’re trying to to do is get our fly to look like it’s floating on the water with nothing attached to it. So it’s just going at the speed and the direction of the water that’s in. Otherwise, unless you’re fishing like a mobile caddis or something like that. But in general, dead drift is usually best for matching a hatch type situation to rising fish or just covering water with a terrestrial or something like that. So there’s a couple ways you can do that, but they each have their pros and cons, so you can go from a downstream position and try and cast upstream, but then you tend to have shorter drift availability before drag sets in. And almost always you’ve got some sort of tension on the tippet. And so when the fish goes and rises and eats the fly, their nose might bump that tippet and hit the tippet first before they get the dry fly. And it just moves it ever so slightly out of the way. And you miss a lot of fish that way. So there’s that issue. And then you can. And also you’re showing the tippet to the fish first, and you don’t want that imprint on the water and a flat water, you know, hard match the hatch situation because they’re going to see that outline of the tippet on the meniscus of the water and just say, yeah, that’s, that’s not a bug. You know, the bugs I’m eating don’t have anything like that attached to it. 00:07:09 Jack: So yeah. 00:07:10 Devin: So in a technical dry fly situation, like, let’s say the Henry’s fork, which we aren’t fishing the ranch or the Henry’s Fork, you know, the Harriman Ranch that everybody knows about for the world championship, for obvious reasons. It’d be an absolute crowd if we had the public anglers and us there. 00:07:26 Jack: But it would be nuts. 00:07:28 Devin: Yeah. Nobody would love us then. Um, and understandably so. But the ranch is famous for folks fishing with a downstream dry fly presentation. So being upstream of the fish and then making a cast where you’re feeding the fly downstream to the fish, usually setting it up with a curve cast or a reach cast so that you can lengthen your dead drift. Now that’s usually a good method for improving a dead drift over complex currents like you get a lot in that section of the river, where you get kind of boiling currents around all the weeds. But the problem with that is that when you set the hook, the fly is coming out of the fish’s mouth away from them. And once again, if there’s any sort of tension at all on the dry fly, they’re bumping that out of the way before they get their mouth over it. So you have to come up with a different method that solves the problems of having total slack in the tippet, so they can get the fly in their mouth and having a total dead drift. Also, if you’re in a competition session where you’ve got a small river, you can’t wade upstream of the fish and then feed a drift back down to them and expect them not to have spooked. It’s fine. On the Henry’s fork when you got a big old river and you can wait out around the fish, or just walk up the bank and then get in. But we often don’t have that situation in the competition. So there are other ways that certain competitors have gotten around doing this. Jack, if you want to maybe hop in a little bit. 00:08:49 Jack: I actually am I’m going to start off with one story where Devon was actually with me back home in the Vail Valley, and we were fishing with a friend from France. He was on the worlds team. His name is Julian. Um, and I’ll butcher his last name, I believe it’s Doug Lyons. And I was Nymphing, and. 00:09:09 Devin: He’s a two time world champ, by the way. 00:09:10 Jack: Yeah, he is one of the best to ever do it. And I was nymphing thinking I was doing pretty well. And I keep looking downstream and Julian is just bringing in fish after fish. And then, you know, this goes on for about an hour and a half, wander down there with Devin and he’s like, oh, I’m fishing a dry fly. And that was like a pivotal moment for me, where I started to fish dry flies religiously for about two years. And that was kind of my, my turning point in how I, I really took dry fly fishing seriously in competition. And I think Devin’s got a pretty good Pablo story to maybe help kick us off here as well. 00:09:45 Devin: All of us have been pretty lucky on the team. We’ve all become pretty good friends with Pablo Castro Pinos, but especially Lance and I have really become good friends with him since he was at the World Championships for all of the early years that I was there, and Lance was often in his group just by happenstance as part of the draw. So they got to know each other real well. And then through Lance, I basically got introduced to Pablo, and Pablo was kind of what I you know, if you’re a young person, you’d call him the OG of Spanish Drive. 00:10:15 Jack: Like, yeah. 00:10:16 Devin: He grew up on the Orbigo River in Leon, which is this really flat water river, very hard fish, very difficult to to get them to eat, let alone, you know, land them because you gotta fish microfine tippet, but there’s big fish in there and all the same problems I just talked about. You’ve got flat water and you have all these presentation challenges where you got to get these fish to, to take your dry fly, but they also have a unique morphology for brown trout. They have this premaxillary bone. So their upper jaw, it protrudes and it’s longer than their lower jaw. It’s a unique strain of brown trout that they have in the rivers there. So it’s almost a little bit like a whitefish mouth if you want to picture it that way. That makes them even harder to hook on dry flies, because that premaxillary bone that’s sticking out there tends to run into the fly before they can get it in their mouth. If you have the tippet on the water in the way where they’re going to rise. So they’re really unique fish. And Pablo came up with a way essentially to target these fish where you lay. What I like to think of as a jay hook on the water. So you use an exceptionally long leader somewhere around nineteen to twenty feet and a fairly thin, but section that doesn’t have a lot of power and an under weighted fly line. So usually around a two way line with a three or a four weight, pretty fast action three or four weight rod. And then essentially you do a sidearm cast that forms the typical fly casting loop, but because it’s sidearm and you aim it a little bit low, you essentially end the cast in that loop shape on the water without it turning over. And it creates, you know, about two thirds of the liter turns over, and then the rest of it is trailing behind downstream, and it looks like the shape of a J on the water. And that method solves most of all these problems. It gives you this immaculate dead drift that you can drift over really complex currents for a long distance. It puts the fly on total slack because you’ve got like eight feet of seven x tippet on there. Um, that just is dangling behind and is incredibly limp. And then also you show the fly to the fish first. So they only see the fly. They’re not seeing that tippet. They rise over the fly on total slack so they can get it in their mouth. But the angler is still downstream of the trout. So when they set the hook, it pulls the fly back into their mouth, and they haven’t had to wait around the fish to get upstream of them and risk spooking them as well. 00:12:44 Jack: And there’s no real need for mending for Devin and I situation, you know. I mean, you see a lot of people trying to, uh, fish over two or three complex currents. And I see this a lot actually, when there’s two or three complex currents and there’s a fish rising across from there, you see someone kind of mending like crazy, trying to make it work, trying to make it work. And then the fly gets ripped out of there at the last second. This is this completely takes away, uh, the drag factor out of the equation. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it does help a lot. I mean, I find when I’m fishing with this, uh, style leader and with my, my setup, I really have no real need to mend, uh, when I’m fishing dry flies. 00:13:30 Devin: Yeah. In fact, Pablo makes it a point every time I’ve talked to him that if you’re mending, you’re doing it wrong because you buy mending, end up moving the line, and then the leader and pulling that intentional slack out of the leader that you’ve set up through that, that cast and with that Uber long leader. And as soon as you induce that tension by pulling out that slack, then you’re removing all the benefits of the system. So when I’m end with this, it’s almost never more than just like the first three to five feet of fly line past the rod tip. And it’s usually just to get over a tiny little current that might be at the rod tip, but I’m never making a mend that goes all the way down the line that, like Jack’s talking about. And because of that, you can fish CDC dry flies that have a very flush profile on the water that you know, are very imitative and you don’t have to worry about constantly sinking them by making a mend that pulls them through the water and soaks them. 00:14:25 Jack: Yeah. It gives you more, it gives you more fishing time. And in competition, uh, it really is as simple as who can keep their flies in the water the longest. Uh, that’s like one of the parts of the equation I’ve always, uh, brought into my competition fishing. And I mean, if you have to dry your fly off, Let’s say two times less than another competitor. There’s a good chance you’re going to beat that competitor. Um, it’s just those small little changes that can, that can make a difference. Uh, in my mind, and I think the only thing I’d add to this is when you first start fishing this way, seven to eight feet of tippet can feel a little weird. Your casting is going to be all over the place. It does get easier. And I like to think of that, uh, tippet, the seven to eight feet is really my buffer. Uh, that’s my buffer against dragging my fly upstream or putting my fly in a place that it doesn’t want to go. And that length of tippet is critical for how this rig works. I mean, you can’t, you would never be able to make this work with three, four, maybe even five feet of tippet. I think that’s one of the most crucial, crucial parts of the of the leader design. 00:15:34 Devin: Uh, yeah, I would agree at least. You certainly can’t do it for more than six inches to a foot on the water. And part of this, the point of it is to be able to set up a drift where you can lead the fish by a long ways so that you’re not going to line them or spook them and still have a good dead drift for, you know, two, three, four, maybe five or six feet to reach the fish. 00:15:54 Dave: And the cast here again. What do you call this system? I guess we could call it a system, but the J hook, is it the J hook cast? Is it kind of. And the leader system is that how do you guys categorize this? I guess maybe you don’t do that, but what would you call this? 00:16:06 Devin: I just call it Spanish dry fly fishing period. 00:16:08 Dave: Okay. 00:16:08 Devin: The J hook is how the leader lands on the water. It’s nothing. It’s not that you’re doing a special sort of cast. You’re not trying to do a reach cast or a curve cast or anything like that. Really, all you’re doing is relying on a long, exceptionally fine leader with an unweighted fly line that reduces the energy of the turnover of the fly line as well, and then flexes the rod less so that you get a tighter loop and more loop control. And you try and avoid shocking the tip of the rod that way too, so you don’t get undulations down that loop you need really fine loop control with this, because if you do start having problem with shocking the rod, then it causes your loop to look like a roller coaster as it’s exiting the fly rod tip. And those, the waves of that roller coaster get wider and wider down the line and into your leader. And then the leader just completely goes off target. So you use a sidearm cast, you’re tilting it probably at least forty five degrees to the side, maybe even more like, you know, thirty degrees off the water. I suppose if you want to look at it from that frame of reference. So it’s not completely parallel to the water, but it’s somewhere between fifteen to forty five degrees above the water. So you’re not casting overhead, you know, with a vertical rod, it’s tilted. And then by tilting it and aiming it, the trajectory of your forward cast a little bit low, you essentially run the line and lead her into the water before the leader has a chance to fully turn over. And that six to eight feet of tippet is trailing downstream of the rest of your leader and your line, and then your line and leader that way. Land off to the side of that tippet which creates that J on the water and also keeps the line and the leader away from the fish and only puts the fly over them. 00:17:51 Jack: And also the casting motion is probably a little different in casting speed. Uh, as Devin touched on, I keep my hands pretty close to my body. Uh, when I’m, when I’m dry fly fishing. 00:18:03 Devin: Very much so. You got to be in control and that helps with that. 00:18:06 Jack: Yeah. And if you were to imagine like a traditional kind of steeple cast, um, or like a river runs through it where there’s a lot of line going out and it’s, it’s very slow. This is, uh, it’s a little more fast paced. Um, and it’s because you can pick this leader up off the water very quickly and be able to put a cast out very quickly as well. So in competitions, Devin and I are always thinking about limiting our casting. So if Devin and I are fishing against each other, let’s say, and it’s taking him one cast to my two casts. Um, that’s like a little thing to think about in competitions where if Devin is able to dry, fly, fish and put a perfect cast in every time, and then maybe I’m taking two casts, you know, he’s going to beat me. And this is this is a system where the leader plus the rod and the fly line is very forgiving if you want to speed up your casting style. And I think it makes it very effective. 00:19:04 Devin: But that’s only if you’ve paired the line and the rod correctly. 00:19:07 Jack: Yep. 00:19:08 Dave: Yeah. I was just going to say, do you need the perfect rod and line set up for this specific type? 00:19:13 Devin: Yeah. So I have a story about that. I went to, to Spain to go basically train this method with Pablo back in twenty twenty one. That was my whole goal of the trip. So I went there for a week with him, but the airline lost my luggage on the way and I had brought a three weight. Uh, well, in my luggage I had a three weight hardy ultralight LX, uh, a nine foot nine inch, three weight. And then I had a three. Wait. Regular delicate taper dry fly line. I can’t remember which specific brand and taper was, but you know, it was paired correctly in quotes. You can’t see me on the screen here, but you know, I got the little finger quotes going. So I had the correct line with the correct weight rod, but the airline lost my luggage. So I got there and I had nothing. So I had to borrow all of Pablo’s gear to fish. And it was the biggest blessing in disguise because he had a faster action three weight than what I had. So a stiffer rod. And then he also had a very delicate taper, low grain weight, two weight scientific anglers line that he uses. I don’t think they make it anymore. I think it was the taper, but they now have their amplitude trout expert, which is sort of my new favorite line for this method. And it’s a really low grain weight, true to, you know, old school, uh, two weight fly line. So I think it’s got seventy or eighty grains in the first thirty feet of line. And by having that pairing, it flexed his rod less and made it so that I could cast it with a pretty fast stroke and not load the rod too deeply. And then I could manipulate it in the air. And it doesn’t cause those undulations like I was talking about. But when my luggage showed up and I had my original three weight with my original three weight line, all of a sudden that rod was loading the rod too deeply for the style of casting. And it was shocking the rod just a little bit. And it ended up making those undulations and the fly line as it exited the rod during the forward cast. And then my cast was constantly landing off target to the left or the right of where I was aiming it. And I was getting really frustrated. And we had a whole day where Pablo and I were basically frustrated with each other, and we just split up and fished on our own. And so the next day I asked to be able to use his rod and line again on the last day because my luggage didn’t show up for five days. And so I had one day with it. And then the last day I was like, you know what? Can I borrow your rod and line again? And it was all of a sudden, like, I could cast once again. The day prior, I was hopeless. But once I had his pairing the final day, I was back to being able to fish how I wanted. I was fishing well and, you know, catching fish and being happy. And so it was something I learned that was really critical to this method. When I got home, I tested a bunch of rods. And the funny thing is that same model rod, that hardy ultralight LL, but in a four weight is considerably stiffer than the three weight in that model. So I ended up with that rod and then still with a really low grain weight, two weight fly line. And a lot of people would think you’re underlining it by two line sizes. How do you even cast that? And it’s what Jack is talking about. It’s making the stroke more compact and focusing on having a very tight loop so that it’s just much more efficient energy transfer, and you don’t need as much mass to load the rod that way. 00:22:33 Jack: Yeah. I mean, I think with the casting it, it almost feels effortless. I mean, when you have this set up correctly, it it is one of the easiest casts I think you could, you could make. And I have a pretty similar story to Devin is when I went over to Spain for the Youth World Fly Fishing Championships in twenty sixteen. Uh, David Archi, who is another very well accomplished, uh, competitive angler from Spain, lent me his rod for practice. And I don’t know how else to put it into words other than when someone gives you a fly rod and they’re like, I want you to cast forty feet away right here. And you can do that exactly on the dot. And it was awesome. And I then went back to my dry fly setup and I was like, this is not this is not working. So for the remainder of the competition, I had to kind of Frankenstein something that would act like David’s setup. And that kind of led me, led me down this road as well. But it’s I don’t know. I think it’s a feeling that I was like, okay, I know what this feels like. I just need to recreate this with something that that works for me with the rod, the line, the leader, etc.. So I think it’s just a always an ongoing development. 00:23:47 Dave: So this is a good start. I mean, we’re already talking about, I think a couple of things, big things that are not your regular dry dropper, nine foot five weight, right. But what else should we be thinking here? I think, Jack, where are we going to talk flies a little bit or what. What do you think would be good to. 00:23:59 Jack: Yeah, I think I think I can, uh, run you through how I would rig my dry fly setup for competitions. Because the cool thing about the five core people on the worlds team is that everyone fishes differently, right? Uh, maybe what Devin fishes for his dry fly setup might not really work for me or vice versa. So everyone’s got their own unique setup. And I think that’s just true to fly fishing in general is, is taking something that works for someone else, adapting it to your own taste and working from there. That’s at least what I’ve done through my, um, competitive history. You know, I’d like to say I pioneered all this stuff, but really what it boils down to is, is finding someone better than you and just kind of watching how they, how they fish and then adapting from there. 00:24:48 Devin: So which is why I went to fish with Pablo. 00:24:50 Jack: Yeah. You know, we all need help, but yeah, in terms of rods, I fish one dry fly rod. It’s a diamondback aeroflex, uh, three weight rod, ten foot. And that’s actually kind of goes against the norm of, uh, lengths of fly rod, especially out west. I mean, and Devin and I, as parts of the world over here, it’s eight and a half foot, nine foot dominated across the west for people who fish dry fly rods. Um, I’d say your typical setup is a nine foot five weight. Devin and I fish ten foot rods. Uh, mainly I do it for presentation and casting. If I’m fishing a nine foot rod. I may not be able to hit a pocket that I want to hit because it’s limiting my casting distance. I also like the strike detection with ten foot rods because I grew up fishing ten foot rods for competition no matter what. So it feels very familiar to me, and I think it allows you just to access certain parts of the river that would not be accessible with a shorter rod. And I think Devin could probably chime in with a little more about why ten foot rod is so important for what we do. 00:26:02 Devin: Well, actually, the main reason why I fish a longer rod is simply because we’re limited to the leader length being twice the length of the rod. So in a competition perspective, if I want a, you know, right now I’m fishing a nine foot nine inch four way, like I said, that hardy ultralight LL that allows me to get a total leader length of nineteen and a half feet. And that’s about, I feel that’s about minimum for this method, the way I like to fish it. And in fact, a lot of times I’d like to be able to go six inches longer with a ten foot rod. But the casting characteristics of that rod fit me better than ten foot rods I’ve tried so far, which is why I kind of landed there, at least for the moment. But it’s something I’m always testing new rods for and new leaders for. But that’s one of the other main reasons. If I were to go to a nine foot rod because of that leader length rule in competition, I’d only be able to fish an eighteen foot leader, and that is. I haven’t been able to create a formula for the this style of fishing in a leader that has worked at eighteen feet yet. So that’s also one of the main reasons for me. 00:27:08 Jack: And I’m in the same boat as Devin because I’ve, I’ve tried nine foot rods and for me, yeah, the leader length is important, but for me it’s more of just the casting and presentation style. I just cannot seem to make a nine foot rod work for what I wanted to do. So that’s why I stick with a nine foot rod. Um, and then three weight. People might think that that is severely underweight for a lot of the water that we fish. And it is, I think the heaviest I would ever fish is probably a four weight. Um, and it just depends on the size of the river, honestly, but I fish. Yeah. Ten foot three. And then my favorite dry fly line is a Cortland four, four, four silk in either a two weight or a three weight line. I do carry two reels with me most days because I like to be underweighted. As Devin said, I think there are a lot of advantages to having an underweight fly line in terms of drag, in terms of presentation, but there are days where it does get pretty windy in Colorado, and I just need something a little punchier. And that’s why I tend to carry two lines with me. Because if it is windy, sometimes that two weight line can fight you a little bit. And then in terms of my lidar setup, I will use maxima. And these are just tapered portions from about twenty to twenty five pound all the way down to to two four pound, and I’m always tweaking my liter formula. It could be every weekend I go out, I will edit something and see if that works. So I don’t really know if I have a true leader formula because I’m always messing around. And then in terms of tippet size, uh, standard for me is seven x. Obviously it depends on the time of year. Uh, there are some times in the spring where I am forced to fish six x or six and a half, but I think the best presentation you can get on a dry fly is with seven X or lighter tippet. And typically that’s based anywhere from six to eight feet, as Devin mentioned. 00:29:05 Dave: Cool. Wow. So yeah, again, there’s a lot to this and what you’re saying, you guys are talking, Devin, you mentioned eighteen versus twenty foot. I mean, two feet makes a huge difference in this system. It sounds like massive difference. Yeah. That’s the difference is I mean you’re talking to a you know, somebody like me and I’m like, wow, I, you know what I mean? I guess it’s this whole nother level. What is the big thing when you, when you lose a foot or two, is it just a balance sort of thing or. 00:29:29 Devin: Well, it comes down to energy transfer in the leader. So you’re intentionally trying to dissipate the right amount of energy so that you get the correct proportion of your leader turning over and laying straight on the water. And then the rest of it completely limp and trailing behind. And then because you’re fishing that sidearm cast, you’re also trying to distance your leader and your line landing on the water off to the side of the fish. So if you go too short, yeah, you could go down, you could shorten the length of your butt section and just try and keep your tippet longer, but your fly line is still two feet closer to your, your fly. And so when you try and make that cast that’s off to the side. So like, for instance, if I’m fishing to a fish that’s off to my right or upstream and off to my right, I’m casting off of my right shoulder, you know, side arm. And I’m aiming my cast probably three to five feet to the left of the fish. And that’s where my line and my leader is going to land. And then my fly’s not going to turn over. So it however wide my loop is at the the point of it contacting the water. That’s how far off to the right my fly is going to land. So it might be, you know, three feet to the right, four or five, depending upon how I formed that loop shape on purpose. And that puts my fly line and my leader away from the fish and doesn’t spook it. If I got to go shorter, that distance, that width of the loop and gets closer. And so I land my fly line on that, but section ever closer to the fish. And once you get under that eighteen and a half, nineteen, you know, eighteen range, you’re just that much closer and it’s easier to spook them. And I can’t get the leader to land with enough of that energy dissipated as well. So it wants to turn over more than I want it to when I start getting down into that shorter length. 00:31:30 Jack: Yeah. I think if you took two foot off the normal leader I fish right now, it would effectively handicap me for the rest of the day. And a because I spend so much time practicing with the same leader, the same tippet lengths, it would, it would throw off my cast and it would throw off accuracy of the fly, the drift speed. It would throw off everything. So I, I would agree with Devin that almost a twenty foot leader is, is mandatory for me at least. 00:32:01 Dave: There’s a place where every bend in the river feels like it’s been waiting for you, where the air smells of sage and pine and trout rise beneath the shadows of the Tetons that places visit Idaho’s Yellowstone Teton Territory, the heartbeat of fly fishing in the west from the legendary Henrys Fork to the winding south Fork of the snake. This is where big fish and bigger stories live, you’ll find endless waters welcoming towns and locals who still wave as you drive by with drift boat in tow. This is your starting point for world class fly fishing, year round recreation, and wild country that stays with you long after you’ve packed up your gear. Check it out right now that’s wet fly swing dot com slash t e t o n. Visit Idaho for yourself and support this podcast while you go. What else should we be thinking about? We’re talking dry fly fishing. How are you guys doing this differently than the nine foot five weight? Anything else? Well, I guess we haven’t talked flies yet. We could probably get into that, but what else we got here? 00:33:00 Devin: Well, I think the the weight of the rod. There’s a couple other aspects there. Number one, if you’re fishing a nine foot five weight all the time, you’re gonna have a hard time not breaking off fish with seven x. So if you’re going down to that diameter of tippet, you know, the, the burlier, the more powerful that rod is, it’s going to help you turn over casts. But in this instance, that’s not what we’re after is hard turnover. And those stiffer flex profiles on on a five weight are also going to have more power to break off the fish on the initial hook set. You’d be surprised, you know, once you get into a three or a four weight rod, it’s got enough cushion that as long as you don’t break off that initial set, all the other surges that a fish does during the fight, they’re fairly easy to control much of the time. And just because of that built in shock absorption of that slightly softer rod. And so you can land very large fish quickly by just metering that pressure through a slightly softer rod, which is it’s the same thing with Euro nymphing. You can land awfully big fish with a two or three weight Euro rod, because it has plenty of power in the lower end of the rod. It’s just that it has a soft enough upper end to it that even out those shocks to the tippet. So that’s part of the reason why we want to, you know, a three or four weight rod instead of a five. So the other thing is that with this leader, the specific stiffness of the type of material you use and the diameter of the material you’re using, not only for the butt section, but also for the tip. It has a really big impact on how the the cast turns over or doesn’t turn over as we want it, and so does the specific style of dry fly. That’s why there’s a fly that I just did on our YouTube channel a little while back. I call the performance Enhancing done. It’s a split wing CDC mayfly pattern, and it’s just a different body style on the initial, like the original split wing CDC mayfly that Pablo came up with for this method. And there’s some magical things about those split wing CDC dry flies. Number one, their aerodynamics is totally different than other dry flies. This with those kind of like bat wing style of the CDC. When you’re casting it, that CDC folds into the hook. And so it makes it far more aerodynamic than something like a parachute dry fly or a harrowing dry fly or anything with hackle on it. And so it’s got a lot less drag going through the air. But then once the fly stops moving, that CDC pops back out to the side and it lands perfectly every time. I’ve never seen that fly as long as you’ve got, you know, the CDC puffed out. I’ve never once seen it land on its side. 00:35:41 Jack: Yep. I will chime in here and say, that has never once happened to me. Ever. 00:35:46 Devin: I’ve never seen it. It lands those. Those wings create a parachute effect so that no matter what the hook which is down below falls under the wing. And so the dry fly lands upright every time. But because it has less drag, you can fish much finer tippet all the way down the leader and just increase the finesse of the presentation. And then that specific wing style also puts the dry fly flat on the water. You won’t see me fishing hackle dry flies very often doing this both because it can twist the leader, but also just because it increases that drag so much. So if I do fish a hackled version of a dry fly, which there is a fly called the Red Baron that’s famous in Spain, that’s often got hackle, like partnered up the shank in addition to the CDC dry. If I do that, I normally have to raise the tippet size or shorten the tip it a little bit to accommodate that extra drag of that dry fly. So along with the rod and along with the leader lengths, you also have to think about the aerodynamics of your dry fly, which is going to change when you go from a size twelve to a fourteen to a sixteen, you know, all the way down to whatever size you’re fishing. Obviously a size twenty two Midge is going to go through the air a lot easier than a size fourteen mayfly had done would. So you have to factor that into your tippet diameter, your tippet length, and maybe even into your tippet material. Over the last couple of years, I never used to be the guy who wanted to carry separate spools of tippet for dry fly fishing, And so I would just still fish fluorocarbon. Because the other thing that I think is a big misnomer out there is that, oh, well, you don’t want fluorocarbon with your dry flies because it sinks your dry flies. If you ever tried to sink fluorocarbon on a flat surface, it’s hard to break it through the meniscus. And actually, I would like my tippet to sink most of the time because I don’t want that imprint on the water. I want my tippet to sink. But the main reason I’ve gone to fishing nylon now instead of fluoro with most of my dry fly fishing, is simply to reduce the stiffness of the tippet I found. Once I did a couple of days of back and forth a B testing where I used the same leader with a fluorocarbon seven x tippet, and then I swapped to the same length of tippet and same seven x diameter. But I went to nylon. And especially with really small dry flies like, you know, midges and small beater stuns, I was just a lot more accurate and I was getting less turnover, which is what I wanted. With the nylon than I was with the fluoro. 00:38:19 Jack: Yeah, I think Devin, those are super important things you brought up. I think the most important thing you brought up is fly design. And I actually changed my, my casting style and even my tippet on my leader based on what fly I’m fishing. So like Devin said, if we’re trying to punch out size twelve, size fourteen mayflies, sometimes I will shorten up my leader by about a foot, especially if it’s windy, because it can kick around those flies a little more than I’d like if I’m fishing smaller midges, smaller viewing style dries. I usually tend to lengthen my tippet by about a foot or two, and mainly because with small flies, they’re just more susceptible to, you know, getting sucked into the wrong current while you’re drifting, etc.. And that gives me a little more forgiveness with smaller flies. And then in terms of casting style, I still keep my hands pretty close to my body when I’m fishing dry flies, but I will open up my my casting stroke almost for larger flies. And that just kind of lets the leader do the work. And for smaller flies, I tend to kind of come over across my body a little tighter. And that’s usually just for accuracy. Uh, smaller fly is for me harder to, to put where I want it. And that’s just practice. But I think with different fly design types, um, there can be different casting styles within what Devin and I are trying to do, because there is a very big difference between fishing a size twenty two midge versus a size twelve hairs. You’re depending on, on the water type and where you’re trying to put that fly. 00:40:00 Devin: Yeah. The other thing to mention with the cast, you’ve got to be able to do it on both sides of your body. So either you have to be extremely ambidextrous or you need to, if you’re a right handed caster, you’ve got to be able to switch over and cast off the left side of your body with your right arm. You can’t fish this method without being able to do that, because as you cross to each side of the river, you’ve got to set the J hook up in the right orientation. That J hook has to land with the fly trailing downstream of the leader. And if you can’t do it on both sides of your body, then on one side of the river, that J hook is going to set it up with the fly landing upstream of your leader. When you need to have it reversed and have it landing downstream. So you got to be able to practice this and do it on both sides of your body. 00:40:44 Jack: Yeah, it’s hard to do. And I guess to touch one last thing on fly design, at least the flies I fish, they are not complicated flies. It can be a CDC wing. It can be a poly wing. I fish those interchangeably sometimes in choppy water. I do like to fish poly wing style dry flies. Um, but there may be one or two material flies just like my nymphs that I don’t like to over complicate things, but these aren’t revolutionary dry fly patterns. A lot of them are adapted from stuff that’s already out there, but I like to keep them very simple. Because with dry flies, you take them out for the day and fish mash them, and then you have to to retie them all on like a nymph where you can maybe get a couple, couple sessions out of it. 00:41:29 Devin: Yeah. I would say, you know, I came from like everybody else. I think I came pretty much in the dyed in the wool. You better look at every little elbow and arsehole on a, on a mayfly, dry and imitate every last thing to, you know, get a fish to eat that when they’re tough. If there’s anything this method has taught me is that we spend a lot of time wasted on designing ever more specific flies to match a hatch. I have simplified my dry fly selection, and I’ve caught what otherwise are very picky fish and very techy tail waters. A get a ton of pressure on fairly impressionistic dry flies, just, you know, a CDC split wing with a body that’s roughly the right color of whatever insect is hatching, whether it’s a caddis or a pmdi or whatever. I’ve fished complex hatches on like the green and Utah, for instance, where you got yellow Sally’s, Pmd’s and caddis all coming off and just a hare’s ear monster. That is what we call it. That’s one of Pablo’s flies. It’s just a CDC split wing with a hare’s ear body, and it catches the fish just fine. It’s so much more about setting up the presentation and the drift and everything correctly. As long as your dry fly is sitting flush, or they’re getting that profile and they get to see the whole thing, and it’s roughly the right size and roughly the right color with a silhouette that doesn’t look completely wrong, they’ll give you plenty of opportunities. And the other thing is with this method, you can cast repeatedly over fish and not spook them. More so than I’ve found with any other style of dry fly fishing. So even if you’re very simple, dry fly isn’t exactly the perfect one. You can give them half a dozen shots and they don’t eat it. They still keep rising. Go to the next really simple dry fly. And just like Jack, I would say most of my dry flies, they literally have a thread or a dubbing for the body or quill maybe. And then they might, if I want to fancy them up, I might put like a pearl tag at the. 00:43:36 Jack: But it’s if I’m feeling real fancy. 00:43:38 Devin: Yeah. Or wind a pearl, you know, silky rib through it with a little counter rib to keep it together. 00:43:44 Dave: What about the hot spots? Are you throwing that stuff in the dries? 00:43:46 Devin: Yeah, yeah. I’ll throw some hot spots with dries. I would say I have probably less of them with dries than I do with nymphs, but mainly because if anybody wants to go dive into it, I just did a video on why fluorescence matters and flies. And I do think it ends up being more important on flies that go subsurface, just because you’re essentially getting fluorescence to glow at depth when UV light is penetrating deep enough to still make that fluorescent material fluoresce. And so you get that fly just glowing and popping a little bit as it gets deeper compared to everything else that’s in the drift. On a dry fly, it can still help, but there’s plenty of light at the surface compared to down, you know, two, three, four or five feet where the light is attenuating. And it’s less important to get your fly scene up there by using fluorescence than it is on a nymph, for example. 00:44:35 Jack: Yeah, I’d say the only tags I fish are primarily on caddis patterns, and that is because sometimes I am fishing them in dirty water. And Devin brought up a great point about how this style of fishing, uh, is great for not spooking fish. I was just on the green River last weekend, and I had probably about eight brown trout rising in front of me, and I started with a size sixteen blooming olive and put maybe fifteen amazing casts over over to quite a few fish. And they acted like they did not want my fly at all. And I was like, all right, interesting. Went to a size eighteen, caught one fish, and then it just stopped and they’re still rising. And I was like, all right, well, we’re going to a twenty. And then right when I put on the twenty, I caught the other, you know, five, six fish right away. And that’s all it took. But if I was fishing a five weight slapping the line on the water, I might have put off a good majority of those fish. So it does give you a little bit of leeway, um, with letting the fish know that you’re, they can’t see your line. Um, and everything’s very removed from the fish’s eyes, uh, in my mind, just a little more forgiveness. 00:45:47 Dave: So stealth is a, is a big part of this. And you kind of, you know, the camo. And I guess that’s something you guys are always thinking about getting ready, kind of, uh, getting on your knees when you have to or are you doing a lot of that out there? 00:45:57 Jack: Personally, I like to wear my like Tiger Woods a little Sunday red out on the river. No, I, I wear a lot of camo. Uh, it just makes me feel better. 00:46:06 Devin: Yeah. The one thing is, a lot of times this is it’s still not a long range method. I would say it’s good up to about forty feet. And then past that, it’s hard to maintain all that loop control with such a light fly line and any wind and such a long leader. So, you know, forty feet is about max comfort range consistently with this. So somewhere between twenty and forty. But in general, it’s a little you’re a little further away from the fish than you would be like when you’re Euro nymphing, for example. So you still want to be stealthy, but I worry more usually about just wading into possession quietly than I do. You know, specifically, like I’m usually far enough away. I probably don’t have to fish for my knees unless it’s a really low water situation, which I did have over the weekend. I had a couple of. I did have a pot of risers that I fished dry flies to and the competitions I had over the weekend and they were in such low, stagnant water that I did creep up close to get over some dry ground and then fish for my knees. But in, you know, a larger river scenario, I wouldn’t have to be quite as stealthy doing this as I would to maybe fish at close range with a urine rig. 00:47:15 Jack: Yeah, getting into position is crucial. I see a lot of people trying to fish dry flies like fifty foot plus like really bomb them out there. And I think that that’s pointless because your hookup ratio is pretty bad. You know, even sometimes at forty foot things can things can go wrong. So I’m with Devin there. I really try to position myself, uh, adequately when fish are rising and in a competition, if it takes me thirty more seconds to, to feel good about where I’m standing and I land a fish versus, you know, walking up the river, trying to trying to cast as I’m walking and, and getting a little flustered. I think that makes all the difference in the world. 00:47:57 Devin: Yeah. I would say going back to my pre-competition days, I loved to fly cast and I still do. It’s one of the things that I that got me into fly fishing over other methods of fishing because I absolutely loved fly cast. And so early on in my fly fishing days, I thought it was cool to be able to like, stretch the limits of how far I could cast and still catch fish. And I got a kick out of that. But as soon as I started competing and fishing with people who were better than me, I realized how much shorter the ranges they were working with were. And I got over my need to throw bombs and started thinking more about my positioning and getting into the correct place to have the best presentation, which in general means go as close to the fish as you can get without spooking them, and then you have less line to manage on the water and you’re crossing less currents and and all of that. I saved my my bomb casts for the lakes these days where it still comes in handy. 00:48:52 Dave: Yeah. For the lakes. Okay. And so back to the fly as that piece. So basically you could have one of these CDC split wing. Could it imitate, you know, midge caddis mayfly emerge. You know, maybe even a merger or a fly that’s in the surface and a fly that’s kind of getting ready to take off or a I mean, are you guys getting into that whole life history or is it not even you don’t even really have to go there. 00:49:14 Jack: I think so. I mean, I think I don’t only fish split wings. I mean, I will fish a shuttlecock style fly, which means the CDC or whatever you’re using to tie the fly is coming off the the eye of the hook. But I would say primarily for me, split wings take up probably about eighty percent of my box. And then there’s small CDC hackled versions where instead of a split wing, I’m just wrapping CDC. But other than that, I don’t try to get too fancy. 00:49:47 Devin: It’s pretty much the same for me. You can imitate anything you want. I’ll even tie them in black. And I do really well when ants and beetles are on the water with it that way. Obviously the ants and the beetles don’t have a, you know, CDC split wing off anywhere, but I have had lots of instances in summer fishing conditions where I was fishing like a hare’s ear or whatever else version, and not catching a fish that I was looking at. And then I switched to a black version and all of a sudden caught the fish on the first cast. And literally it was the same fly, but just had a different colored body. So it can imitate lots of things. And then like Jack said, if I want an A merger that’s stuck in the film, I flip the wing around and I split it facing forward. So then it’s turned into a shuttlecock, but it still has. The other thing about the split wing CDC dries. They always have a little yarn or floss fluorescent post that you can see, because that’s what you’re using to split the wing. And so if I’m going to do a shuttlecock, I like to do the same thing. So I still have a little fluorescent tag to, to spot on the water, but I just tie the wing in reverse so that it’s facing forward. 00:50:52 Jack: Yeah, there’s not a single fly in my box that doesn’t have some sort of post or fluorescent tag. And when there is low light, I mean those gray these these CDC wings, they’re they’re gray, brown, whatever, primarily gray. They blend in very well, especially if you have very clear water. And I mean, there, there are days where it’s perfect conditions where I struggle to even find my dry fly, even with a post. So I think just the more help you can get, um, with some added visibility is, is a huge, huge thing for me. 00:51:25 Devin: Yeah. And a lot of people would, would question whether that changes their effectiveness in my own experience fishing them in the clearest water scenarios that I’ve come across, uh, like in New Zealand and elsewhere, I’ve never seen a fish like come up to it and feel like they saw the post and turned away. 00:51:42 Jack: Yeah, I’ve never had that either. 00:51:44 Dave: Nice. And is it just back on the fly? Is it, uh, you know, size, color, shape? What are you guys focusing? Is it, you know, you see a bug coming on, I guess heads or noses poking out there? Is that talk about that. What’s the mindset when you guys get ready to switch maybe from euros over for me? 00:52:00 Jack: Yeah, I have two styles of flies. I have, I would call them kind of my my sight fishing flies. And those are, you know, if I’m fishing a blooming doll of hatch, I’m gonna put on a size eighteen olive dry fly. Right. Um, but we’re not always fortunate enough to have hatches going on throughout the day. So I do have a certain selection of dry flies that are kind of my covering water dries and those might be size sixteen or fourteen for the summer, primarily sixteen, but stuff I’ll just kind of splatter around the river. Um, and I know fish are going to eat it if they’re happy and they’re just a little more, uh, suggestive. Like, like Devin mentioned a little hare’s ear dry fly or something brown for me. I just tie them with dubbing. So it’s nothing crazy, but those are kind of the two styles I break it into. 00:52:49 Dave: Gotcha. Well, I guess let’s take it out of here, you guys, just with the you’ve got the event coming up here, right? I mean, this is, uh, the world Championship and you know, it’s coming to eastern Idaho. Is this something where people can come out? I know they can’t necessarily be, like, right next to you, but like, if somebody’s listening now and they want to check this out, can they show up there in Idaho Falls and on the river and find out more information? 00:53:11 Devin: Well, the first thing we would say is that we probably still need what are called controllers, which are just like referees for anglers. So that’s a great way to come. Very dutifully watch some excellent anglers from across the planet. So if you’re interested and you want to volunteer, we would love to have you. And if you just emailed me at the shop, I have a we just have a Google form that you can fill out and sign up to be a volunteer. And then the championship will definitely be happy to have you. But yeah, it’s you can also come spectate. We would definitely ask anybody who does come is very respectful and, you know, stays back away from the river and is quiet. Maybe think of it as like a golf tournament. 00:53:52 Dave: Yeah, I was going to say the similarities is golf, right? 00:53:55 Jack: Very similar. 00:53:56 Dave: Yeah. Nobody’s yelling while you’re. Yeah. There’s nobody heckling you from the sidelines, right? 00:54:01 Devin: Yeah. Well, the other you know, the other aspect is that we’re doing our level best to not spook fish. And if someone ruins that for us, then it really sucks. Oh, yeah. And whether it’s spectators or just other random folks who’ve showed up, that has happened far more times than I like to think of in a world championship. 00:54:21 Dave: So that’s the other unique thing about this, is that I think in some of the other countries, right? It’s, uh, it’s basically just you guys, but here it’s, there will be potentially public people fishing out there. 00:54:31 Devin: Yeah. I mean, one thing that we’ve tried really hard to do, or at least Glade has, uh, but I’ve talked to him a lot about venues. We’ve tried really hard to pick venues where we’re not going to impact like really popular public fishing places, even on the rivers that we’re fishing that are more well known. We’ve intentionally picked stretches that are harder to access, that just don’t get a lot of public pressure because we don’t want to impact anybody else’s day and we don’t want them impacting us. Right? So we’re just trying to minimize conflict as much as possible. And we just don’t want to have a negative interaction with the public. So any way we can defer that as much as possible, which is a big part of the reason why the specific stretches of river were chosen that have been used. 00:55:14 Dave: Yeah. And the controllers, I’m glad you mentioned that because that’s a big thing that people, they really want to get out there. They can. Yeah, volunteer and help out and get right there next to you guys. And what helped with all sorts of things, including maybe measuring fish and things like that, or what are the controllers mainly doing? 00:55:29 Devin: They measure fish and record them. And then just make sure that you’re following the rules and that, uh, they’ll get some training beforehand. Um, do some online video training and, uh, they’ll, they’ll know what to do. It’s not a difficult or a complex job. You have a few rules. You got to make sure that the competitors are following. And mainly you’re just there to, to help them make sure they’re doing that and then record their fish for them. 00:55:50 Jack: And most people who I’ve roped into controlling. Uh, I have never regretted it. They always come to me and say, that was like one of the coolest. It’s like going on a guide trip, but you’re just quiet the whole time. And then, you know, you can ask some questions afterwards. But every person that I’ve, I’ve roped into controlling has said it’s been a super positive experience for them as anglers. 00:56:13 Devin: Yeah. And they had the youth in the women’s championship there last year. And I think there’s a surprisingly high percentage of the people that volunteered last year are coming back because they had a good time last year. And even though it was arduous, because a lot of times we were doing two sessions a day last year with because they had two separate championships running simultaneously. Even with all that extra work, they still wanted to come back this year. So I figure it says something about the experience and the learning that goes on when you get to watch really good anglers. 00:56:44 Dave: Yeah. It’s pretty, uh, and those are two good outcomes, right? But last year, what happened, what was the final outcome on both the women’s and the and the adults and the men’s. 00:56:52 Devin: Well, the youth and the ladies one. So. So yeah, that was good. The men’s it’s not a men’s field because there’s actually still some women that, that compete in ours as well. But the, the larger kind of, um normal adult field, I guess the eighteen to fifty is what division we fish in pretty packed. It’s very packed. It’s a much larger championship and there’s some very high powered countries there that are hard. So if we can win this year, I would be obviously ecstatic. And over the moon we’ve done really well to get medals the last two years and feel like we’ve finally got some consistency. And honestly, you know, we’d still be happy to make that happen again because it’s a lot harder to beat, you know, France, Spain, Czech Republic. 00:57:40 Jack: And the twenty five other teams. 00:57:42 Devin: Yeah, it’s a lot harder than people realize. 00:57:45 Dave: Right. Wow. This is great. And I think that, um, yeah, I mean, we’re going to the great thing about this is this is just the first, uh, we’re gonna have a few more of these episodes here with the other team and maybe give a shout out to you guys as the starting five that are going to be out there. Other than you guys, who are the other folks? 00:58:00 Devin: We’ll give a shout out to the whole crew, man. They’re all important. Um, yeah, it’s me and Jack and there’s Cody Burgdorf, which is also Jack’s boss, which is kind of funny. 00:58:09 Jack: We do, we talk a lot about fishing. 00:58:12 Devin: And then there’s Jack and Cody are both from from Colorado. I’m from Wyoming, and there’s Michael Bradley and Austin Shoemaker from North Carolina. Austin’s our our alternate, but he’s super helpful and extremely valuable to us. Uh, and is there to, you know, fill in if one of us happens to not be able to fish. And then there’s also Mike Kamara from Pennsylvania and normally Glade Guenther is our captain. It’s, uh, sort of up in the air this year. Whether he’ll still be able to do that or not because he’s also the one organizing the championship. So either way we owe him a giant debt of gratitude considering all the work he puts in basically on a daily basis. 00:58:53 Jack: A lot of heavy lifting on his part. 00:58:55 Dave: Not easy. 00:58:56 Devin: Yeah. 00:58:57 Dave: Organizing and getting like, uh, funding, right. Sponsors. And like, there’s the whole whole thing he’s putting together there. 00:59:03 Devin: Yeah, he’s, he’s like Atlas right now, uh, holding the weight of the world on his shoulders, trying to make sure this championship gets to the finish line. So. 00:59:11 Dave: Exactly. Before we get out of here, you guys just give we talked to. If I say give us one each of you one good dry fly tip. Somebody’s going to be probably trying to pick up this gear we talked about. Start working on this. What would you tell them as they get on the water and they’re going to be trying to hit some dry flies out there. 00:59:26 Jack: Yeah. I’d say, uh, when setting the hook, keep the rod tip as low as possible a way I used to practice this was even like almost putting the rod tip in the water or like acting like it was a golf swing right in your, you’re swinging, uh, towards the ball. Yeah. That’s that’s kind of how I thought of it. I see a lot of people who, you know, do that classic trout set up in there. And I think you’re just hurting yourself. I think the more attention you can put into the line, uh, at a, at a rapid pace is always desirable for me. 00:59:59 Dave: So setting lower and kind of towards, I don’t know, I guess it depends on where the fish is oriented, but just lower angle. 01:00:05 Jack: Think of like the rod tip, just being on like an almost level level plane instead of like a sloping curve, that which you would see. Most people set the hook. 01:00:14 Devin: And I would say always downstream because you always need to pull that fly back into the fish’s mouth. And to echo what Jack said, the very first day that I walked off the car and went and fished with Pablo, uh, there was a fish rising in his home river there, the orbigo that I was fishing with him, and he caught it, of course, and I watched him set the hook. And the very first thing I noticed was his rod tip went through the water like a mouse running across the surface. Oh, wow. And that was a very clear signal to me that he cared about that as well. You know, Dave, I’m going to gonna be super boring with my tip. 01:00:49 Dave: Yeah. Sorry. 01:00:50 Devin: Really, what it boils down to is most people could use a lot of practice getting better at their cast. If this is a method you want to to take, you’ve got to learn how to create repeatable, tight, controlled loops with very little energy. Most people are using their whole body to cast, when you like, go to a fly fishing show and watch the casting pond and it looks like people are getting an oblique workout when they’re up there. Cast. 01:01:16 Dave: That’s right. They’re going for it. 01:01:18 Devin: Yeah, that’s not what you should be doing. If you’re putting a lot of effort out to make your fly casts. You need to have an evaluation done of your cast and film yourself, and then watch some really good casters online and see what they look like compared to you. And it’s not anything that anybody can improve. I’m still very much trying to improve myself, and I analyze little, little tweaks to be able to make the fly line do things that I want it to do based on the conditions and the specific currents of water and all that. But really what it boils down to is if you can’t create a controlled tight loop time after time, then you’re going to struggle to use this method. So if it’s something you want to dial into, get your cast dialed to. 01:02:05 Jack: And leave the nymph box at home and just force yourself to fish dry flies for three months, all summer. That’s what I did. 01:02:14 Dave: Yeah, that’s good advice. Just stick with the dries. Cool. All right, guys, well, we’re going to be talking more as we move forward here. This is just the first one. So I’m excited about this year. And and you know basically shed more light on some tips on all what you guys do out there. So thanks again for all your time and we’ll keep in touch with you. 01:02:32 Jack: Yeah. Thanks for having us, Dave. 01:02:33 Devin: Thanks for having us. Hope everybody enjoyed it. Go out and fish on dry flies. 01:02:38 Dave: All right. If you enjoyed that one you want to get in touch with this event, please do that. We’ll have links in the show notes to this episode. If you want to get involved being a controller, or if you just want to show up and, and check out some of the best in the world, not only Devin and Jack, but the whole team USA plus the other countries from around the world. We’re going to be excited to see this one this year. World Championships, Eastern Idaho. You don’t want to miss it this year. I want to give a big heads up to what we have going here. If you want to connect with me out west as well, check in with me, Dave at web dot com. We’ve got a bunch of great trips going on this year, and I am trying to connect with as many people as I can. Would love to see you on the water this year. If you have any questions, you can check in with me anytime. All right. I want to thank you for tuning in today and hope you can get out and explore a few new waters this year and explore that road less traveled. We’ll talk to you then.