My fly line tippets never last me very long. Early in the season, I’ll put a new wind knot in a tippet on every cast. I’ve actually gotten two knots on a single cast before. I don’t even know how that’s possible, but I’ve done it.
I’ve gotten wind knots in my leader, too, and even in the fly line itself. Again, that doesn’t seem like it would be physically possible, but if there’s a way to screw up a fly line, I’ll find it.
And now I’m moving on from putting wind knots in fly lines to making them magically appear in all sorts of other fibers and lines. My wife put me to work building a wood shed recently, and the first thing I did was to get a wind knot in the extension cord. I plugged one end of the cord into the wall by the garage, and I threw the coil toward where I was building the shed. It got about 10 feet, then fell to the ground in a tangled mass. As I unwound it from itself, all the snarls came out fairly easily, except for one in the dead center of the cord. It was a perfect, tight wind knot.
Later that day, I was trying to put a chalk line on a piece of plywood I was putting on the roof of the shed. I was at one end of the board, and I was trying to throw the line to the other end, eight feet away. I tossed the hook out ahead of me, and much like my fly casts, it wrapped itself in its own line and fell straight down only a few feet away. When I tried to reel it back in, the line stopped with about two feet still out. Yep, it was another wind knot.
I’ve been told time and time again how to cast a fly line without getting a wind knot, but I’m incapable of doing it right. And now that I’ve had the same outcome with a bunch of other strings, it’s apparent that even if I figure out how to do it right, I’m still going to get knots. I guess I’m just kinda’ knotty.
