One
Year Ago -01/23/01 - Friends, And The Little Smoky River
Two Years Ago - 01/23/00
- Wolves & A Chicken Rancher Three Years Ago -
01/14/99 - Masters Of Classic Cane
About two hours later I stood in the middle of the Croton
Falls Outlet, casting a small streamer; but instead of seeing
nature’s beautifully written lyric poem--the stream--I kept
seeing the banker-looking man with a fly in his ear.
I was sad.
But not just for him.
You see, since I often experienced the serenity of losing my
self, my worries in a stream, a lake or a surf, I was sad for all
those who never did and never would.
All those who, in my mind, seemed cheated.
And yet I was almost one of them.
But unable to afford to take up golf and walk those
beautiful courses I saw on TV, I stayed with fly fishing.
And struggled.
And grew tired of being hit by my fly.
So finally I traded in my real flies for simulated ones:
small pieces of shoelaces; then I spent literally hundreds of
hours on a lawn practicing fly casting.
And one by one I slowly discovered the many reasons the fly
hit me or my rod.
I’d like to share them with you.
To begin, let’s look at the first basic casting defect:
lowering the rod tip from the target line at the end of our
casts.
It is a well-known principal of fly casting that the fly
will go in the direction the rod tip moved when it was abruptly
stopped.
Therefore, during the cast we must not lower the rod tip
from the target line..
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Well, not really.
There are many causes that inadvertently lower our rod hand
and, therefore, the rod tip.
1: Breaking our wrist more than halfway on the forward cast,
and therefore lowering our hand when executing the power snap.
2: Lowering our shoulders at the end of the cast. (This is
sometimes caused by casting with too low of a trajectory.)
3: Casting out of sync with our body’s rotation, and therefore being
unable to lead with our elbow during the forward loading move.
4: Stopping our rod too late in the casting stroke. 5: Beginning
the cast with our rod hand too low for our intended trajectory.
(This often occurs when we execute a low backcast, then add a
drift move.)
6: Breaking our wrist at the end of the back cast.
7: Sliding our elbow back too much during the back cast, and
therefore lowering the rod tip. (If we finish our back cast with
our elbow past our ear, it will be almost impossible to move our
rod hand in a straight line during the forward cast. So, to add
a long drift move after the cast, we should keep our elbow in
place, our shoulders level, and move our rod hand back to in-line
with our shoulder, break our wrist and lower the rod to about two
o’clock to the horizon.)
8: Trying to make a long backcast with
our back foot pointed too far outward, and then not being able to
stop the rod abruptly.
9: Casting with
our elbow all the way our from our body.
Now let’s turn to the second basic casting defect: not
having enough power on the cast to maintain the proper
trajectory. As with the first defect, there are many causes for this.
1: Casting a weighted fly too hard on the forward cast and
causing our fly to pull our line down and add slack.
2: Not
accelerating faster on the back cast than on the forward cast so
that we can make up for not having the added power of a wrist
snap.
3: Starting the false cast too early or late and, in
effect, shortening our casting stroke. (As a general rule, the
more velocity on the cast and the heavier my fly, the earlier I
begin my next false cast.)
4: Adding slack because we hauled too
long and hard in relation to the acceleration used on our
false-cast stroke, and/or because we prematurely moved our rod
back at the end of the back cast.
5: Beginning the cast with our
line hand below our rod hand, and therefore moving our rod hand
first and not initially loading our rod. (If I shoot line after
I’ve hauled, I simultaneously move my line hand upward so I can
get it up to my rod hand before the line unrolls.)
6: Double
hauling or drifting into a stiff wind.
7: Using too a fly too
heavy for the weight of our line. (When casting heavy flies I
shorten my leaders and lengthen my hauls.)
8: Giving line back
too fast after hauling.
9: Drifting the rod too far and/or too
fast.
10: False casting and/or shooting too much line.
11:
Executing a long cast and prematurely shifting our weight and
getting our body ahead of our casting arm. (To help prevent
this, we should begin the cast as we watch the line unroll.)
Finally, if you are as I was, you probably avoid getting hit
by the fly by casting three-quarters or even sidearm. This will
work, but it will only camouflage your casting defects; and you
still might hit, and possibly break, your rod tip. However, in
the real world of fishing, even the best casters make less than
perfect casts so, unless the wind is blowing from your rod-hand
side, I recommend casting all heavy flies with your rod pointed
slightly outward, and always wearing sunglasses and a
broad-brimmed hat.
And try not to get too discouraged. Think of all those golfers spending hours and hours at driving ranges.
Maybe some of life’s rewards are meant to be earned.
The Muncher is a favorite of Ian James for carp, smallies, more. 
Thoughts of a Chicken Rancher. Doc tells it like it is.