Those who follow my videos already know that I am very fond of bead chains. They provide an easy way of making interesting experiments and you can learn a lot by playing with them.

The experiment below is one of my favorites. It is about the implications of a piled anchor on a spey cast. The corollary? Two things:

• A piled anchor doesn’t hold as well as a straight one.
• A piled anchor increases the amount of dead line by, of course, decreasing the amount of live line; and that, generally speaking, isn’t a good idea.