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Walter.....
Yes, these elliptical casts can certainly be done using hauls.
In 1941, we had been using silk lines for years. You are correct,
that nylon came out for fly line construction about a year or so before that. (I
first saw demos of nylon and "glass cloth" at the 1939 Worlds Fair in
N.Y.).........but when we entered the war in Dec, '41, it became impossible to
get anything made of nylon. Silk was hard to get, too......so ladies resorted to
painting their legs with a stocking colored, (taupe) material. They even
had a black marker to mark a fake, "silk stocking" seam line on the backs of
their legs !
....Thing was that nylon, being novel , hadn't been stocked
much....whereas silk fly lines were to be had at most fly tackle
stores......until a couple of years into the war when you could get
neither. While a new material called, "plastic" had been invented in the
'30s, as far as I know, nobody used any form of it for fly lines.
One of the reasons that fly fishing in the salt water didn't gain any
popularity, was the extreme difficulty in reaching the fish with the casting
methods most anglers used in those days. Another was the fact that the
salt, itself, quickly destroyed the available bamboo rods, silk lines, and
Cuttyhunk (braided flax) backing as well as the reels, most of which would
quickly corrode. My grandfather, my father, brothers and I did it anyway,
but only with infuriating attention to tackle maintenance. Other fishermen
thought we were nuts.....until we demonstrated many catches made with flies much
smaller and lighter than anything they could cast.
Beryllium copper multi-step taper fly rods came out in 1940. After
the war began, they were discontinued. While they were resistant to salt
corrosion, they were terrible casting tools.
Joe Brooks and a few others made fly casting history in the salt.
Later, Lefty, Flip Pallot and Chico, started making tapered fly lines by hand
starting with heavy nylon mono and sanding it down by hand to provide the taper
! PVC coated braided core fly lines appeared and the rest, you know.
A forgotten part of fly fishing history.
Gordy
Gordy
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