Page 18 - Joseph B. Healy "The Pocket Guide to Fishing Knots"

application. It used to be a fishing line was dried after use, to protect it

from wearing thin or rotting. In Tackle Tinkering, H. G. Tapply writes about
allowing a fishing line to dry on a piece of newspaper—in fact, he
recommends that method. (Although H. G. cautions “remember, when
drying, to keep the line out of the sun and away from direct heat.”) That
book was published in the 1940s. I’ve been lucky in my career as an
outdoors editor, and one shining friendship was getting to know Bill
Tapply, the son of H. G. Tapply (also known as Tap). I never told Bill this

truth … that I learned to read from studying “Tap’s Tips” in Field &
Stream. Quite literally, I was probably three or four years old at the time—
though it wouldn’t have been the first time Bill had heard that, no doubt.
Generations loved Tap and his outdoor tips. (Other readers loved Bill, for
he was a talented mystery novelist, as well as a gifted outdoor

storyteller.) H. G. takes us deeper into history when writing about
dressing bait-casting lines with beeswax, paraffin, or fly-line dressing.
The same was true for fly lines of the 1940s—they needed to be dressed
before use. I won’t go into H. G.’s advice for detecting breaks in a fly-line
surface and repairing the line. Refinishing a HDG or GAF fly line in that
era was tedious and time-consuming and never guaranteed saving the
line. Even knowing the kind and size of line you were using required

some guesswork or mathematics with the use of a micrometer. Back
then, anglers tried to follow guidelines from the National Association of
Angling and Casting Clubs to determine a uniform system of fly-line size
—I say “tried to follow” because lots of variance existed depending on the
type of line.
Speaking of the alphabetic soup of fly-line designations back in the

mid-twentieth century, we learn from The Practical Fly Fisherman by A. J.
McClane about the actual letter-size designations of fly lines back then,
which accounted for the names of the lines such as HDH or HCH or GBG
and FAF. For hoots and giggles, as they say, let’s take a look:

NOMINAL DIAMETERS
LETTER SIZE
(In 1000th of Inch)

I .022

H .025