Stuff I learned this week, about long bellies

So this summer I started messing around with more traditional spey casting. To me this means long belly lines and longer spey rods. I have been less than open to this type of casting and fishing for several years, discounting its benefits and cursing any short comings. However, late this spring I cast a 15' 10 weight belonging to my friend Tom Towne, he had a CND 80' head on it and it was a lot of fun to cast, and the casts were huge.

I started joining Tom and our friend Paul Anselmo for casting practice on weekends this summer. At first I brought my switch rod and short light sticks, but kept enjoying casting Tom's Burkheimer.

In 2002, I sold Paul a Scott ARC 15' 9 weight, that I owned. Paul never really liked it that much and, so, I bought it back from him this year. I then began the very tough process of finding the right line for it. I had a Wulff triangle taper of unknown weight which had no punch to it, I also owned the original XLT 7/8 which weighs 880 grns, and I was able to make that work, but not great. I tried Tom's CND line and that felt pretty good.

Then at the local Spey Clave last Weekend I tried a 10wt Snowbee line with a long head the Chris Anderson from Sage owns and it felt much better than any thing else I had yet tried, until Simon from Rio took some time to let me try the Rio PowerSpey lines. The 10/11 was great, the 9/10 was way better. The PowerSpey is shorter and lighter than alot of lines I have tried (the 9/10 = 68' head, 740grn) but the cast is smooth and easy and it feels like it will fish all day long.

In preparation, for BR's and my to the Clearwater next week I also took the liberty of trying to dial in a good long belly on his old brown Sage 9140-4 and I mean the original one from the early 90's. Well, I got a hold of the new SA XLT 8wt this line has a head length of 80-85' and 710grn. We had tried the original XLT7/8 (880grn) on it in 2002 on the Thompson with rather poor results, but the new XLT 8 fished great on BR's 9140. I was able to cast the whole head, which in it's self is pretty amazing.

So... this week I learned that:
1) Scott ARC 15' 9wt takes the Rio 9/10 PowerSpey
2) Sage 9140-4 (Old Original Brown) Takes the XLT 8

I also learned:
3) New super powerful spey cast for tournament type casting
4) That I don't really need to known new super powerful spey cast for tournament type casting.
5) Speyco reels are really cool, check out the link.

and:
6) Palin is pure evil