Spey casting training on Raba

 I opened year 2022 with spey casting session on Raba.  I took 2 rods with me: full size double hand rod CND Black Spey 13'6 7/8/9, and trout spey rod Winston Boron ii TH-MS 11' 4wt.

The place I chose for casting is section of Raba river in Nieznanowice.  This part is good for spey casting for two reasons. First, river is not very narrow, and has enough space for full size spey rod. Second, there's fine gravel on the bottom, easy to wade, which allows to stand in the middle of the river, and practice left-hand and right-hand spey casts. River level was 247 cm and flow 10,5 m3/s.

I started with CND. First, I rigged it with Airflo Scandi Compact 34' 540 grain (blue), and 15' tapered leader. I tried single spey, double spey and snake roll, from both sides of the river.  It seems like I lost my ability to spey cast. I struggled to make a narrow loop, and too often, my leader collapsed a the end of the cast, instead of unroll straight.

Second shooting head I tried Vision ACE 36' 525 grain (orange), and 12' tapered leader. With this shooting head, I had better results. Despite ACE and Scandi Compact are similar, this head has slightly different profile, with finer taper, and more mass in the rear end of the head.  I don't know how this is contributed to the loop shape, but with this head I had much less tailing loops. But, 12' leader is a bit short for this head, I often had blown anchor. 

The third one is Guideline 3D+ PowerTaper 36' 510 grain (lime green) and 9' tapered leader.  This head was a winner. Because it is integrated sink tip shooting head, it requires much shorter leader than previous two. It creates nice loops, and no blown anchors. Surprisingly with my bad casting technique, this line saved my casts.  Unfortunately, this line is not versatile, and cannot be used in shallow or low water. I should have similar head but with float/intermediate configuration.

After playing with CND a bit, I switched to my trout spey rig: Winston Boron iiTH-MS 11' 4wt.  CND wasn't much used in Poland, because we don't have salmon rivers here, and for most of our fishing this rod is too big and too powerful.  But, I used trout spey rod a lot, in our big mountain rivers like Dunajec and San. I usually don't use it on Raba, but this is training, not fishing. Why not?

I rigged the rod with Royal Wulff Ambush 290 grain head, 20' length. It requires a polyleader or tip at the end. I attached SA Sonar 10' intermediate polyleader, and 3' piece of monofilament at the end. To make it look like a real fishing rig, I tied-in "glaicha" (condom worm) nymph. That would be my "to go" nymph on early season. 

The rig was quite usable, although the nymph is quite heavy for scandi set up, i think it's better to use Skagit head and T-tip for casting such big and air-resistant fly.

Later, I changed 10' polyleader to 8'5" Sonar textured sink tip. But , something didn't work right. It was too clunky when falling into the water, and splash could scare fish away. Maybe I need to adjust my casting technique, or use a lighter fly.  

I didn't catch anything, and not expected that. Raba is late starter, in winter fish rarely takes there. But, I love double hand casting for the sake of it.