A comparison of distance fly- performance between three long-belly floating lines #5 – Barrio GT140S, Rio Gold Tournament and MED Ulrik Röijezon, CCI, PhD and Stefan Siikavaara, MCCI 2011-02-28 Piteå, Sweden [email protected] and [email protected]

Background: Long-belly weight forward fly-lines have gained Figure 1. Longest casts for each caster with each line: Barrio GT140S, Rio Gold Tournament and SA MED. huge popularity around the world, both for and for 40 competitive distance casting. The Mastery Expert Distance (MED) by Scientific Anglers (SA), USA is one of the most 35 commonly used long-belly fly-lines. Recently two new long- belly lines were introduced on the market: the Rio Gold 30 Tournament (Rio, USA) and the Barrio GT140S (Barrio Fly Lines, Scotland). 25 Barrio 20 Rio Aim: Compare the distance casting performance of the # 5 Meters SA MED long belly fly lines: SA MED, Rio Gold Tournament and Barrio 15 GT140S. 10

Method: Sixteen casters, eight with long experience of fly- 5 casting and eight with less experience, each performed eight 0 casts with all three lines. All lines were cast with the same 12345678910111213141516 type of rod (MSX Sapphire 790-4) fitted with the same type of Casters reel (Danielsson/Loop Graphite) and identical 9´ leaders. The test was performed as an indoor shoot-out using the overhead casting technique. ANOVAs where used for statistical analyses. Result: The two longest casts were performed with the Barrio GT140S, the third longest with the SA MED and the fourth longest with the Rio Gold Tournament (Fig. 1). There were, however, no significant differences between the lines for the whole group (p>0.05). Nor were there any significant differences when the subgroups of experienced and less experienced fly casters were analysed separately (p>0.05) (Table 1 and 2). Conclusion: At group level there were no significant differences in distance casting performance between the three lines when casting was performed indoors. At the Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank individual level, however, casters may have a specific Svenska Castingförbundet (the Swedish Casting Association) preference for one line, which may be related to, e.g., the for their help with completing the study, and Magnus Angus familiarity with the line, or how well it suits an individual for valuable help reviewing the manuscript. Also thanks to casting technique. MSX for sponsoring of fly rods.