Stripping the Line in Fly Fishing

Video Transcript

"ALVIN DEDEAUX: Okay. We're shooting our line out now and then what you might notice is that we have to retrieve the line somehow. That's called striping the line. It doesn't have anything to do with taking your clothes off. Striping, it just means pulling the line back in, and that's how you're going to retrieve most of the time when you're fly fishing. The reel will not come into play a lot of the time unless you hook a really big fish and it pulls all your slack out that you have trapped here under your finger and then he'll get on the reel. Most of the time when we're fly-fishing, we're going to do most of our retrieving like this, by striping the line, whether we're striping the line to retrieve the fly or to pick up slack. Or if we hook a fish, more often than not, if you've got some slack here, what you're going to do is clamp down there and strip the line to retrieve it. You can strip line and retrieve much faster than you can by reeling. I can pull in three or four feet of line pretty quickly this way, whereas by if I was trying to reel it in with the reel, I'd have to do several cranks to get that line in. So striping the line is very important. So whether you're casting or you just want to pull your line back in after you shot it out to make the next cast or whether you've actually hooked the fish and you want to try to retrieve that line as quickly as you can, this is what we call striping line, right here."