Airflo lines

With the rods and reels taken care of and already presented on this blog, it's time to talk about fly lines. One might be tempted to think that for pike fly fishing, lines are not that critical. This may be true to a certain extent while fishing for pike in Dutch polders, where short to very short casts are the rule and the water is hardly ever deeper than 1 meter (often less), but not out there in Finland! In Finland we'll be fishing at sea in deeper, very clear water, so if we want to stand a chance at all to win the tournament, we'd better cast as far as possible every single time.

With that in mind we can only be very lucky to have Airflo as our line sponsor. Because if there's one fly line out there that fits our specific needs in Finland, it has to be the Airflo Ridge Striper (by the way: don't you just love those gorgious ranunculus on their site?). Now let's have a look at the specific features of this line and find out how well it fits our needs at the tournament.

First: it's a dedicated COLD saltwater fly line. And since we're supposed to be fishing within 4 weeks from now in a sea that's currently still rock solid because of an ice cover of appr. 40 cm. thick, this feature perfectly fits our bill.

Second: although it's not a dedicated pike line, the taper of the Airflo Ridge Striper is quite right: a mid-lenght belly and a relatively short front taper are great for casting big flies a long way.

Third: to make the casts even longer (and that's what we want), the line comes with the Ridge technology: less friction on the guides of the rod and therefore more distance. Perfect!

Fourth: well this is a feature that makes it really stand out from other fly lines (even dedicated pike lines): the Power Core. It means that the line has virtually no stretch, so setting the hook is much more direct, even at longer distances. For pike fly fishing, this is a truly great benefit, since setting a bushy hook in the toothy mouth of a pike can sometimes be a quite a challenge. Combining the strip-strike technique (more about that later on this blog) with these Power Core lines takes hook setting in pike fly fishing to another level.

Fifth: these lines also come in a clear intermediate version, which we will be using next to our regular floaters.

And finally: our collection of lines we take to battle in Finland also doubles as a nice visual illusion for this blog: is it straight or not?