A New Survey, a Milestone, and a Cautionary Tale of Old Knots

Survey Information
Well our last survey (located on the right side of this page under the "Discounts" information and probably an advertisement) indicated that Bennett Spring is the most popular trout park among readers of this site!  A new poll is up and will be for the next week.  It asks what is your favorite species to fly fish for other than trout?  Feel free to vote and see what others are fishing for.

A BIG Milestone For This Site
Holy maccaroni- we just hit 20,000 views last night!  In the grand scheme of internet views and numbers, that's a small number compared to espn.com or msn.com but when you consider that this site was started because I ran out of pages in my fishing journal, well that's pretty incredible.  I still find myself getting excited about all of the views and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading this, thank you for visiting, and thank you for making me so happy.  This site is nothing without its viewers and I would have quit posting a long time ago if nobody was reading or interested in what I was posting.  The encouragement of my wife and colleagues pushed me to start this site but viewers like you is what keeps things going.  Thanks again!

Old Knots
About a month ago I was catching some hybrids/wipers off the dam at Blue Springs Lake.  I had already landed a few nice fish when I hooked into something BIG.  The fish got into my backing pretty quick and I noticed during the fight that the connection between my backing and fly line looked a little frayed.  I thought that I would just retie a new knot after I landed the fish but as chance would have it, I was not afforded that luxury.  That fish took not only my fly and leader, but also my fly line.  Aside from losing the fish, I lost about $90 in fly line.  After the incident, I had some time to reflect and I realized that the knot I was relying on had been tied about 14 years ago by a guy at Cabela's.  The fly line itself was in good condition because I hadn't used my 8 weight very much but I HAD caught a number of fish recently that got into my backing.  The point I am trying to make here is this: have you checked the knot that connects your fly line and backing lately.  Maybe you should to avoid disaster.