Swing the Fly Issue 2.1 Summer 2014 | Page 19

Where possible at all, wading is pushy. More often you’re on shore fighting a steep bank or willow thicket sixty-feet tall and a half-mile long. The Limay often requires long casts, which given the terrain features just mentioned, can lead to frustrating series of tangles and flubbed casts.

To deal with the tough natural layout, two systems have become popular on the river. Both end up producing a standard steelhead style swing, but how they get there is quite different. Richard, along with most old school Argentines, uses a heavy head section of T-11 or T-14 attached to an Amnesia running line. Like a crude precursor to modern shooting head lines, they get the head section in the air then let the light, thin running line shoot with the forward cast. It’s an awkard system to cast and takes a while of balancing the head weight to your rod. The results are impressive, both for the ability to cast and produce fish.

Good casters can blast out a hundred and twenty feet of line, while the true effectiveness comes in the ability of the heavy sinking head to get down to fish in the deep fast current. The Amnesia running line helps by cutting through the water much better than a floating running line. The downsides to the system are the difficulty to cast, an inability to mend the Amnesia, and the thin slick nature of the Amnesia being an overall pain to strip and manage. To its credit the system is cheap and effective, and we can say that about oh so few things in the fly fishing world.

While Richard fills his mouth with coils of Amnesia prepping for another cast, I finish rigging my 13’6” spey rod. My first trip to the Limay I realized the potential for spey style casting for all the reasons mentioned earlier. The lack of room to backcast and the tough wading were reasons that I got into two-handed rods in the first place. I use a Skagit setup that allows me to throw heavy T-11 and T-14 heads. While I think that the Amnesia running line gets the fly in position faster than the big bellied shooting head allows, I can also pound casts all day while the single hand approach gets fatigued after a few hours.

In the end it’s a similar result regardless of the line and the rod. Shoot for the far side and let the line and the current work its magic. After a few hours without a take I start playing with a slow stripping retrieve until Richard sees me and lectures me to let the fly swing naturally. “These fish spend all the time in the river. You think they don’t know the exact speed of the current. You have to let current move the fly. No stripping!” he tells me.