TGIF wrote:
I am surprised that those fish skulls aren’t heavier than a tungsten cone.
Aside from weight, what about shape and material... I just picture a spoon, Rapala or wobbler slicing through the air better than a clauser or equal weight. When my son wanted to fish a clauser for stripers on a spinning rod, I had to put a one ounce egg weight above the swivel. Admittedly, it was on a medium action rod, that takes some weight to load. Even then, our range was limited.
Except for surf casting, my spinning was mostly confined to ultra light and light tackle. You can throw surf casting plugs a hellacious long way, much farther than I can cast a fly, but so far nobody is talking about designating FFO beaches, and, as my 10 year old nephew pointed out, most of the trout we catch in Maine are smaller than those lures.
In the range of rods designed to cast 2-8 pound test line and lures from 1/64th to 1/4 ounce--still a big range--my experience was that at the small end, all that really mattered was weight. A 1/32 ounce marabou jig--deadly, essentially a conehead wooly bugger--cast about the same as a 1/32 ounce Panther Martin.
With bigger lures, wind resistance comes into play. The two smallest sizes of Rapala's--a great baitfish pattern--weigh 1/16 ounce. They are bigger and more wind resistant than a spinner or spoon of the same weight, and I couldn't cast them as far. My favorite high water/big river lures were a 1 inch, 1/10 ounce Colorado spoon or a 1.5 inch, 1/6 ounce Thomas spoon. Both were better cast on light vs. ultralight tackle. On my favorite pool on the Deerfield, which Google Earth indicates is 85 feet wide, I could almost cast bank to bank with the heavier one. (Back then, I could not have cast a streamer that far, but I could today with the right rod.) Maybe 50-60 feet with the lighter one. Long casts were rarely an effective way to fish them, because either your lure was quickly swinging in fast current and not getting down to depth, or, if you made a long upstream cast, you couldn't keep in contact with the lure in heavy current. Short casts to pockets behind rocks or deep slots in the middle of fast water were very effective. Just like they are with a weighted sculpin or a nymph rig.
To me, by far the biggest difference between Maine's FFO and ALO regulations is that ALO allows trolling. This is mostly meaningless on moving water--except for creating an perennial rule book dispute over where to draw the FFO/ALO line on the Moose River below Brassua Dam. But it matters a lot on lakes and especially on small ponds. I'd hate to see people trolling some of my favorite small trout ponds. On the other hand, over in NH, you can troll in FFO water. One of my favorite Upper Andro wild trout ponds is across the state line in NH, and while a lifetime of fishing Maine FFO ponds makes me vaguely uneasy when I go in there and see people trolling streamers along the shore, I can't say I've noticed that the trout population has suffered for it. The pond is C+R, as all designated wild trout ponds in NH are. I have always assumed this was an FFO pond, but it turns out it's ALO. I've never seen a spinning rod in there, but it's a place I only fish once every few years.
FWIW, here is NH's "fly fishing" definition, which may be a model for the folks who want a regulation based on fly reels vs. spinning reels.
Fly-fishing: Fishing by trolling or casting with only fly rod, fly reel, and fly line combination with an artificial fly or cast of artificial flies attached, and does not include the use of spinning, spincast, and casting rods and reels and lead core lines.And is a fly rod not a "casting" rod? If it's not, all those casting instructors need to find a new line of work.

Any definition can be quibbled with--and will be come mid-winter.