Fly Fishing Guide

Ice In The Guides? PAM? WD-40?

howdy again … while fly fishing in the cold, i have noticed that ice will sometimes get in the guides of my pole like the last two guides, the end one and the next one down. can you do anything about this?? i have heard you can spray PAM on the pole but will this do antyhing to the line? what about that goop you can smear on the guides?

There are several solutions to this problem. I wouldn’t use WD-40. Never know what that will do to your line, leader, or even your rod for that matter. Whatever you use, you have to be able to take it with you, because you can’t just spray some Pam on there and expect it to stay on all day. It’ll wear off. I use this:

http://www.cabelas.com/p-0011253316090a.shtml

…though I didn’t buy it at Cabella’s. I got it at my local fly shop. It’s kinda waxy but kinda oily and I smear it on the guides and on the rod and even on the line. It does NOT keep ice out of the guides. Not permanently, anyway. However, it does give me 12 or 15 casts before ice-up when otherwise I’d only get 9 or 10. It also helps keeps tiny beads of ice from forming on the line itself, which can be as annoying as having that top guide ice over.

Sometimes when the ice builds up you can do like the other dude here said and dip it in the water then give it a shake, but when it’s 15 degrees dipping your rod tip in the water will just result in a bigger glob of ice. I was fishing two Saturdays ago and it was in the low teens. On the first fish of the day I dipped my net in the water to scoop him up and as I was fiddling with my hemos to get the fly out of his lip the net bag froze in the shape of a small bread basket. Stayed that way for the rest of the day. It’d loosen up a tiny bit when I dipped it for a new fish, but then it would freeze up again even thicker. It was like like netting fish with the basket from a McDonald’s french fry cooker. At the end of he day it was just a solid, heavy form. I was afraid that I might crush it and break the netting.

Anyhow, when it’s that cold, nothing is going to keep away the ice except maybe going indoors, and even then you might get a little on there. The plain fact is that if you are going out to fish in that kind of weather, you are admitting to Mother Nature that you have a mental illness, and you have to take whatever She deals out.