Painfully Obvious Tip #6

I've been fishing downstream drifts more frequently lately. I started this habit mostly because some of the good lies on a local stream are now blocked by fallen trees from last fall's floods and fishing down and across is now the only way to get to them.

Last week I was having trouble feeding line into one particularly tough spot. I was using a rod I hadn't used in a while, a seven foot four weight, and I attributed my inability to effectively feed line to the fact that I usually did this sort of thing with a nine foot five weight.

Of course, I then had similar difficulty on a subsequent trip feeding line with the five weight. Which is when lightning struck and I realized that I had fished the same line on both the four weight (uplined for small streams) and the five weight.

Which brings us to Painfully Obvious Tip™ #6:

After you fish a scum filled small pond from the bank and have let your line sit in the muddy swill at your feet, take a moment to clean the line.

A couple of minutes cleaning the line (and the guides) made it shoot a whole lot better. I'm going to clean the rest of my lines tonight just to be sure.