Originally Posted by
Bill Kiene semi-retired
I am pretty lazy so I don't do anything until I feel the line is really "dragging" through the guides.
Then I use to just get a new line off the shelf....
Actually, "back in the day" the fly line companies would give us staff members all the free fly lines we wanted.
Al Perryman once said to wash the line with a mild detergent, wipe dry and fish it.
I would wash it with a mild soap, wipe it dry and apply "what ever" line dressing you want with a soft cloth.
Then try to wipe it all off or polish it off like car wax.
In the old days people used Mucilin paste, red or green. Green has silicone.
Cortland had a cloth patch soaked in their formula that was in every fly line box or you could buy it separately.
There was "Russ Peak Line Dressing" too. Russ built lovely fiberglass fly rods in southern Cal.
After putting a fly rod together Russ coated the entire rod blank, wraps and all, with a finish of some type.
Loone Products will have something.
I remember tropical saltwater guys used WD40 on rag.
If you use one fly line a lot I would ask your grandmother to buy you one for Christmas?
We had people come in with outfits with old Cortland 444 Peach float lines that were 30 years old and were like new?
We had people come in with new floating fly lines that they said sank?
Then we had others come in with new sinking lines that did not sink?
One of my staff said, let them trade each other? Only kidden.......
One time I was loading up a reel for a customer with a new Scientific Angler Aircel Supreme weight forward 4 floater.
It seamed like it was way too long? so I measured it and it was actually two lines on one plastic spool.
I just measured the length and cut it in half and measured the diameter and trimmed the points a little.
The lines were so thin that the "lady" at SA did not notice she missed the end and beginning to cut it so we got two lines.
You can not believe in 50 years how many weight forward fly lines I found that were on the reel backwards?
The customers commented that "yes, it never really cast very well." No kidden........
We even found shooting heads on backwards but that was not as tragic.
Young Paul Boley, Harry Boley's son, came in for some advice on catching some Half-pounders about 30 years ago.
He had one of his dad's old outfits and it had no backing? I explained the reality and I put backing on his old Pflueger Medalist fly reel.
Later he told me that very evening he hooked about a 5# Steelhead above Watt Avenue and the fish took out all his fly line, way into
his new backing.
I guess fly lines are around $100 but most think they are the most important part of an outfit....
Because of the reputation of my staff, fly lines were actually the largest part of our business' sales dollars.
Bob Giannoni would come in and measure the "points" of all the lets say, DT3F lines we had. He likes small points.
40 years ago we sold hundreds of Cortland and Scientific Angler 30 foot factory shooting heads in all sizes and sink rates.
Heads were a huge part of our market in those days, before the development of integrated sink-tip fly lines.
We would take a grain scale and weigh every shooting head that came in and put the weight on the box.
Cortland's heads varied quite a bit which was a good thing for matching lines to individual rods.
Scientific Angler heads did not vary much so they were usually spot on the IGFA designated weights.
There are lots of thing that the customer is better off not knowing.
Like the fact that the head weight of Weight forward fly lines can vary a lot.
I told that to someone once and he was never happy after that.......
Fly fishing equipment today is so amazing that most can cast this new stuff pretty well.