Last week was an interesting week at the WCs in Italy. Really sucked regards Rickard’s delayed luggage. Similar thing for Michal last time in Norway. That’s totally disruptive. Not only terms of having to cast with unfamiliar (and poorer quality!) gear, that you haven’t been training with for the last two years (and more of course), but also it’s just awful mental preparation. Rickard is up there with the best of the best and wants a shot at Gold.

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New Zealand is stuck in a weather pattern at the moment. Cooler, and windier than our usual conditions. Not much rain either, for a lot of the country. Once again snowing on the central North Island mountains adjacent to Lake Taupo. Given Taupo sits at 400m above sea level, it's cool.

Mixing life with fishing is a challenge. I try to make my chances. My daughter had football at one of my favourite fishing spots, so I drove down early. Heavy winds, but on a big lake there is always a shore where the wind is behind you and the casting is easier. Taupō is New Zealand's biggest lake, and after three days of wind the waves on the beach were substantial by lake standards. I avoided those. But they gave me a thought, which I filed away to test later.

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I've written about 'carry' many times on the FP previously, but being as there's an active thread on the board about it, I thought I'd revisit the topic today. I think everyone would agree that increasing your carry is a sure fire way to increase your distance for competition casting, and to make your fishing casts more efficient and therefore easier.

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I was going to do a different fly this week, but then I just happened to tie a little brush fly for a bit of fun yesterday and I thought how nice and versatile they are. So that's what you're getting this week.

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I wake up on Friday morning, it would be time to write FP. I haven't got message from Paul, How it is going? That's how he reminds about FP. It is slow morning, I have to pick up guest from airport after 11 am. It is heavy rain and forecast is that it will rain whole weekend, tough fishing coming.
 
I lay in bed and I feel how small creatures are working in my muscles, like mining people or in server center. Rebuilding connections and muscles, overwriting muscle memory. I can even hear they chatting.... It will take time, yet work has begun.

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I have a problem extending my carry. I assumed that it involved poorly formed, inconsistent, backcasts and designed a practice accordingly. Of course, on taking it to the grass, it morphed into something else - it was easy enough to practice picking leaves and monitoring the loop but only in a closed stance. Alternatively I tried performing the triangle drill - it’s easy enough to craft a clean stop, maintain a little tension, and get a loop to move to the end of the line but these loops aren’t the bedrock of my fishing stroke. When the rod is moved in the horizontal plane gravity tends to separate the plane of the rod's arc from the plane of the loop. The planes merge if more energy is added to the stroke. Only in the vertical plane are they completely aligned. For me it requires a little more tip-speed to get things right overhead. 

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