Last week we passed on a tip related to making longer spey casts with shooting heads – holding your loops in your top hand. For those of you who like to huck, we’re following that up today with another tidbit that helps with easier casts at longer distances. This one comes from the world of…
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Spey
Pinch Loops in Your Top Hand
Your fearless editor spent last week fishing two-handed rods for steelhead and chinook salmon at BC West on the Dean River. We had a stellar group of folks at the lodge, including Michael White, Simms and Idylwilde rep for the Southern Rockies. Whitey gave up another nice spey casting tip during the week, and we…
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Sage TCX Switch Rod Review
Last year at IFTD we told you about Sage’s new line of TCX switch rods. We’ve finally gotten enough time in fishing one that we feel competent to write up a review. The past few weeks we fished the 8119-4 TCX a whole bunch at Alaska West, and guess what – we’re in love. About…
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Try Some Rubber Tape!
At Alaska West and BC West, lots of our anglers fish spey rods. Most of the time we’re spey casting, we’re using Skagit-style heads. Skagit heads require running line between the head and the backing, and for easy casting and line handling, lots of folks prefer using mono running lines. One problem with mono running…
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Spey Casting and Hand Position
Brian Niska’s series of spey casting tips continues today, with some great discussion on hand position. This is one of our favorites! Reduce Fatigue and Increase Speycasting Performance with Proper Hand Position Proper hand position will enable you to utilize the larger joints to develop power for the speycast, thereby reducing fatigue and increasing casting…
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Top 7 Alaska Fishing Tips
With our season at Alaska West right around the corner, we figured it was an excellent time to review our most popular posts with Alaska fishing tips on our blog. 7 seemed like a good number, and these have gotten the most visits in the lifetime of our humble little home on the web! Bead…
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Loops vs. Coils Demonstration
Hopefully we sort out the ‘loops versus coils’ thing today! We’ve run a couple of posts in the past about holding your running line when you’re spey fishing, and one tip that we’ve mentioned is to hold loops, not coils of running line – two posts that mention the topic are this one with 3…
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Slack is the Enemy
We’re happy to return to Brian Niska‘s series of tips on spey casting. For those of you new to our blog, over the past few months Brian has been taking us through some step-by-step tips on the spey cast. Topics to date have included Wade Shallow and Relax, Start with a Lift, Setting up for the…
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Airflo Skagit Switch Review
Back in September we told you about Airflo’s new Skagit Switch Heads – a potential solution to the “nobody makes a modern spey line for my switch rod” problem. Since the early version of the head that we got our hands on at IFTD, Airflo has gone through a couple more iterations. Last month we…
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Watch the D Loop
Brian Niska is back today with the next in his series of spey casting tips. He’s breaking down the fundamental elements of the spey cast, and today’s topic is the D Loop. Watch the D Loop I don’t want to hype it up too much….. but the best speycasting tip you’ll probably ever get is…
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