may the force be with you

the whole point of my trip this week was to do a field test on piketreks pikesaber fly rod the full review will be on the pffa website later today , so the plan was to go down and fish old bury hill fisheries near dorking in surrey from a punt . with fishing partner and good friend tony harkin , as you can see from the pictures we didn't have the best of conditions

in the background you can see whats called the jungle , an area that has no bank access at all and around 3 to 4 feet deep is usually a great place for predators , but the colour of the water was awful , not really a problem for me as with depths like this i would have been able to raise a few fish with the sub bugs on the surface , of course that's if id feckin remembered to put the 2 boxes of the things id chosen the night before in my bag unbelievable "mental note don't pack bag while on red wine"

high sticking

it just wasn't happening with the flies being deep and on the bottom so i decided to high stick the flies with a slow sink intermediate line in shallow water what this involves is quite simply casting the line out and holding the rod high give the line a couple of strips back and you fly will break surface as above when it does give a couple of short strips to move the fly under the surface then let it sink again for a few seconds this moves a lot of water and can give you some fantastic surface sport without the need for a floating line or poppers

THE FLIES

i pretty much only used the piketrek pike body fibres for these flies (a lot to do with leaving my subbugs at home) but i wanted to get some video footage of the flies in action as well to show what this stuff looked like in the water

pike body fibre in action

the pike saber

without going to much into a review the one of the things i really loved about this rod was the fact i could get it into some pretty tight corners as below

the other thing about the pikesaber was the the ease that it threw big flies the picture below is a 13 inch fly thrown wet a few false casts and you could feel the rod loading and then bang your line just keeps going i got down to the backing with the cast below on a 10wgt intermediate line and if i had a load of the backing off the reel it would have taken that as well , and this wasn't a fluke i did this time and time again quite unbelievable

below i had a thought that there would be a pike sitting in this gap the saber got the fly in there no bother at all with very little effort although the pike didn't appreciate the effort id gone to just check the colour of that water where is the bloody subbugs when you need them

even the kid from the def leppard lets get rocked video thought it was a cool rod as well although just after this picture was taken he started playing air guitar with it thanks son

so in short if you fly fish for pike then you really need to own one of these if your in the states i also think this would make a superb striper , largemouth bass , muskie rod more on this when ken over at pike adventures gets out again when the ice melts

thanks again go out to tony harkin for taking the pictures and putting me up for the night do something about those cats mate they are evil

do yourself a favour get the next generation of predator rod in your collection once used you'll never go back

tight lines

mcfluffchucker

(a cave in Scotland)