Leader designs / Hans Gebetsroither / History

Welcome back,

Gordy, I constructed the leaders and did some casting. Basically, in order to have the leaders that had a smaller diameter butt section turnover I had to use excessive power. If I didn’t the loop would collapse where the smaller diameter butt section was. All in all this was a good exercise.

Keep up the good work.

Lou

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I did the same thing. Found I couldn't easily get those to turn over. When I used a lot of force, I lost control of the layout. Hard to explain was the observation that when I cast with a tight loop, the turnover control was worse, not better.

A lot depended upon the length of the segments..... especially the segments which were of smaller diameter up high in the leader. The longer these segments, the worse the layout.

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I really enjoy looking over the history of fly fishing..... so much information and expertise gained over the years !

Watching that video clip of Hans Gebetsroither was most interesting to me. I had heard a great deal about him from, "Bear" Samples who had spent time with him while in Austria serving as a chaplain with the U.S. Army. Hans was head keeper on the Traun River, and considered a true expert trout fisherman and a specialist in dry fly fishing for European Grayling.

Charles Ritz describes a very productive trip fishing with him on the Traun, in 1938. (A Fly Fisher's Life, Charles Ritz, pp. 193-198.)

While Hans is known for popularizing the Austrian method of single handed casting.... sometimes called the, "European continuous tension casting", I have no idea if he actually invented it .... or whether Albert Godart, a Belgian who used a modification of it to win an International event in the 30's had even known of him. (My guess is that he had, since he, too had fished during those pre-WWII years with Ritz.)

Interesting that in Ernie Schwiebert's 1834 page tome, TROUT, complete with an exhaustive history of fly fishing and an even more impressive index, there is only one mention of Gebetsroither which I could find ..... That is on p 420, and simply consistes of a quote from Charles Ritz mentioning a chap named, Hans . His last name isn't even mentioned or indexed !

This despite the fact that he describes Albert Godart and what he called the, "Belgian school of casting" in some detail., pp. 1216 - 1222.

Makes me wonder how many things in fly fishing and fly casting may had been invented years before folks who wrote about these techniques actually got credit for them.

We get excited over new ways of casting to solve certain problems.... and many of us love to ponder the new scientific explanations behind casting ...... yet we sometimes forget the casters and fishermen who lived years before us and set the building blocks of what we now discuss as, "new stuff".

I remember, for example, a simple change of direction maneuver which I was taught back in the 30's by my grandfather... Just something we did. Now it's called the, "snake roll". I, also, remember an old video of Tom White's which showed what he called a, "dump cast". We, now, call it a, "snap cast". This evolved into the, "snap-T" of Two Handed Casting. Perhaps someone did that 100 years before and didn't call it anything at all.

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