Lines, lines, lines, sometimes I get to feeling like a teacher tasked with the duty of checking the repetitive dross set for misbehaving prepubescent students when it comes to the inches reserved for tackle reviews in the fishing press. Pardon any rod related puns but tackle talk really does get a caning!
Flash in the pan rant over with, I thought that it would be an interesting exercise to redress the balance a little in this respect and extol the virtues of the often unsung understudy to the flyline we know as backing. Other than sitting on the reel underneath the line, lessening the effects of coiled memory and waiting for the moment when “that” fish will eventually strip your line into the no mans land between earth and sky that we generally refer to as the horizon, you would be forgiven for thinking that it could not serve any other purpose.
Whoa there! Tighten that drag and apply the brakes, I have a couple of suggestions for those near spent spools of high visibility gaudiness languishing in that dust covered box of odds and sods we all keep somewhere…
First and foremost conditions on our northern spate rivers often make sight fishing with a nymph whilst wading difficult, and I know that many anglers in these circumstances (me included) tend to pay more attention to what the tip of the line is doing in its travel downstream on the current whilst the nymph braves its way through the sub surface depths.
Tackle trekkies on the other hand who frequently know better than us when it comes to upstream nymphing are our enlightened counterparts in the fluff chucking world who prefer subscribing to the use of indicator yarns, foam bungs and thingamabobbers to signal a take, the whole process of which (to philistines such as myself) seems costly and rather like tossing hand grenades in upstream with a foot of monofilament and fly attached to the pin for all of the subtlety it employs!
Ok hands in the air, I’m not the biggest fan of this last technique, it’s just an opinion I hold and not a judgement, if it works it works we can save the debate on float fishing for another day, but surely in these austere times it would be far simpler and cheaper to trade in the technology for a tag end of backing? I mean if it works well as an indicator in European leader to hand methods surely it can have the desired effect in an everyday run of the mill rig? Think of it as throwing the fuse cord and not the fireworks, the only explosion you really want is when the fish takes the fly and not when float hits the water, sorry I meant “indicator”!
Changing tack from the virtues of using backing as an indicator I feel that there is also a place to be made for it amongst the ever increasing amount of material paraphernalia that gets set aside for the purpose of tying the flies that we fish. Take the techniques of paired feather split wings and hackle point wings for example, what is it that we are looking to achieve exactly when the dry fly passes over the head of a fish against a strongly lit background? The answer is simple, a silhouette!
Now let me make quick with the point, the higher breaking strains of braided backing are of a fine diameter with semi rigid qualities, because of this short lengths can quite easily be worked into distinctive wing shapes for a number of patterns. If we were to use this type of backing in the tying of dry flies we might be able to create the acceptable outline of a wing that could be quickly reinvigorated and restored back to the original shape once it begins to look a bit bedraggled, thought provoking no?
I aren’t out to list every possible use of backing here and now, but go on and experiment a little with some make do and mend, who’s to say where it will get you; it may even shorten a learning curve.
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