So Spring 2017 was pretty much a damp squib, fishing wise. That finally changed as we moved into early summer. I booked a Backbone cabin for five nights following final exam week at the university and was basically in nirvana, tying flies, cooking, and reading in the evenings and fishing like a zealot in near ideal conditions all day.
The Backbone cabins are just a ridiculous value, $50 a night. They tend to be booked solid on weekends year round, and they are booked solid during the summer when only full week bookings are accepted. In spring and fall, however, they are usually free Sunday night through Thursday. I can only rarely take advantage of this, but it’s like a pressure release valve when I can.
I’ve been searching for a better way to store my lines while on the water. I started out like most people with the classic blue Tenkara spools. They’re nice and work well, but they take up a lot of space in the vest or sling. I moved to EZ Keepers. I find them unmatched for convenience and hence have used them more than anything else. But they have two problems. First, they just don’t fit on several of my rods. You can put them on a Rhodo, for example, but they’re so close together on the available rod blank that it’s kind of silly and unusable. More seriously, when I’m fishing I use a BW Sports Fishing Backpack, and store my rods in the mesh pockets on the sides, held up top by fabric straps. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the little “bink!” sound as I’ve placed a rod with the line wrapped up in EZ Keepers in the pocket and one of the Keeper tabs has caught on the strap and snapped open, sending the tightly wrapped line into an instant hopeless snarl. (This is usually accompanied by jolly screams of “FWORD! FWORDING FWORDING FWORD!” but so are many things in the dreamy, relaxing world of small stream fishing.) If they had some kind of safety catch they’d be golden, but as it is they’re kind of a mine waiting to go off.
Anyway, so I read Tom Davis’s post on making your own polystyrene sheet line holders and decided to give it a go. It was easy to order more white sheets than I’m likely ever to need for ten bucks on Amazon. I made my own template in a vector graphics program and printed it out. (In the extremely unlikely event that anyone wants it, here it is.)
Then I used a thin blue sharpie to trace the pattern on the polystyrene sheet and cut out the line holders with scissors, following Tom’s guide. I didn’t have a hole punch like Tom used, so just kind of hacked a little hole to secure the hook when winding on a line with tippet and hook. I made a little slit at the base of one “spoke” to secure the knotted end of the line when there wasn’t a tippet and hook. With blessed time on my hands the first evening at the cabin, I spent it fashioning these, cutting new lines to replace my frayed and variously wind knotted ones, and putting each on their own labelled spool.
The verdict after a summer of fishing with them: they’re not as handy as the EZ Keepers and there’s no way I’ll ever have the patience to use them on the water. It takes too long to wind the line on. But then I never had the patience to use the old blue spools (or any other spools) this way, either. So I’m sticking with the EZ Keepers for “hot-swapping” rods on the water, despite the frustrations. However, as a way of organizing and storing lines in the fishing vest or the ultralight sling, the plasticard spools can’t be beat. They weigh very little and you can instantly see what they are and what they’re for. I’ll be using them going forward.