u/cozy-maple10

She's normally the picky one out of my three, always waiting for the pellet to sink and settle before even considering it. I've been trying to get her comfortable with hand feeding for about a month now since her tank got moved to a spot where I can actually sit next to it comfortably.

Today I dangled a nightcrawler piece just above the gravel and she came right up and snatched it without hesitating. Her gills did that little flare thing they do when they're excited about food, all fluffy and pink. Felt like a weirdly big win for a Tuesday.

For anyone else working on this, what finally worked for me was staying still and just letting my hand rest in the water for a few minutes before even introducing food, so she got used to it being there and not a threat. Patience over speed I guess.

Anyway just wanted to share since she's usually such a snob about food. Hope everyone's axies are doing well and eating good this week.

I've been doing SRT trips for about a year and a half now and I finally feel comfortable on rope. Rigging a drop, transitioning at a rebelay, even dealing with a stuck ascender doesn't rattle me the way it used to. But last month a buddy talked me into a horizontal system with a couple of squeezes rated as tight for our region, and I basically fell apart mentally about twenty feet into the first one.

It wasn't the space itself. I've done belly crawls before without much issue. It was more that on rope I always have a very clear sense of what's above and below me, and my brain has built a whole set of routines around trusting the gear. In a crawl there's no gear to trust, just your own body reading the rock, and I found myself second guessing every twist and exhale in a way that made the whole thing feel way more claustrophobic than it probably was.

We turned around before the tightest section, which in hindsight was the right call since I was starting to breathe too fast and that's exactly when people get stuck. My partner said the fix is just repetition in easier horizontal cave until it stops feeling foreign, similar to how vertical clicked for me after enough hangs on rope.

Curious if others who came up primarily as vertical cavers had this same disconnect. Did going back to basics in simple horizontal passage help, or was it more about specific breathing and body positioning techniques you had to learn separately. Trying to figure out whether I need more mileage or an actual different mental approach before I go back for that squeeze.

I think a lot of my navigation mistakes come from confidence at the wrong moments. Early in a leg I'm careful, checking the map every fifty meters or so, and then somewhere in the middle I start trusting my memory of the terrain instead of the terrain itself. That gap is exactly where I lose time. Yesterday was a good reminder that slowing down for ten seconds to nail an attack point is almost always cheaper than the nine minutes I spent wandering reentrants that all looked the same.

Ended up finishing mid pack, nothing special, but I walked away from that one control with a better lesson than I've gotten from a lot of clean races. Curious if other people have a moment like that where a mistake taught them more than a good run would have.

I've been at this for about two seasons now and I still catch myself second guessing my level line length every time I hit a stretch of water I haven't fished before. My default is rod length plus maybe a foot or two, but that feels more like a habit than an actual decision at this point.

Yesterday I was on a narrow brushy creek, barely six feet wide in most spots, and I ended up shortening way down, almost to rod length exactly, just to keep from hanging up in the branches on every cast. Caught a few small brookies doing that, but I kept wondering if I was leaving fish behind in the deeper pools downstream where a longer line probably would have covered water better.

I know the textbook answer is "match the line to the water," but in practice I feel like I'm just guessing based on how annoyed I am at snagging trees. Curious how other people actually approach this when they walk up to an unfamiliar stream. Do you start long and shorten up as needed, or the opposite? Do you change line length mid-session or mostly commit once you've read the water?

Also curious if anyone fishes with more than one line length rigged and ready, like keeping a second line on a spool in your vest, or if that's more trouble than it's worth for a day trip.