Articles

5 fly casting tips

Fighting tailing loops, lazy loops, finding your stroke length and more

by John Juracek - Wednesday, Aug 1st, 2018

Casting on Nez Perce Creek in Yellowstone National Park (photo: John Juracek).

In the process of teaching fly casting, certain faults of technique show up regularly among my students. In the notes I send to each student after a lesson, I find myself frequently reiterating certain basic principles. Here are a few of the most common. I hope they’ll stimulate you to think about your own casting.

A dish called Wanda

The mind reeled at the possibilities

by Tom Davis - Monday, Jul 30th, 2018

Photo: Craig James Myran / cc2.0

A couple of years—eternity, by the adolescent calendar—had passed since we’d last stopped at the resort in Minnesota on our way back from Canada. This time, though, seeing Wanda was my number one priority. Sure, I was looking forward to fishing for rock bass in the little river; I even had an idea that I might try flailing away with my piece-of-crap flyrod. But there had been plenty of action up on Lake of the Woods, and Wanda and I had hit it off so resoundingly before … the mind reeled at the possibilities.

Middle Lake

That bright memory is tangled with another, darker one

by Tom Davis - Wednesday, Jul 25th, 2018

Photo: Big Windy Complex / cc2.0 / edited

Below Elizabeth Falls, where it thunders out of Black Lake, the Fond du Lac du Nord relaxes. The river sprawls across a boulder-studded delta, braiding into pools and riffles and narrow chutes before losing velocity and spilling into a mile-wide bowl. The roar of whitewater becomes a murmur, the murmur a sigh. A tall, flat-topped esker, so perfectly and symmetrically formed that it might have been engineered by an ancient civilization, cradles this widening on the far side. The near shore is lower, a gradual rise through willows and alders to the lance-like crowns of spruce.

That guy

On most fishing trips, there's one

by Chris Hunt - Tuesday, Jul 24th, 2018

Photo: Chad Shmukler

As the tropical rain continued to beat down atop the minivan, we waited. Five of us, all soaked to the bone and spent after hours casting fruitlessly over foot-deep water to anything that looked like it might be a bonefish, had congregated at the car, done for the day.

Review: Waterworks-Lamson Speedster HD reel

A look at Lamson's ultra-large arbor update to its Speedster line

by Joseph Albanese - Monday, Jul 23rd, 2018

Photo: Christopher Dickey

“A fly reel’s job is to just hold line.”

You’ve probably heard that a thousand times. In most cases, that’s true. If you fish mountain streams where a nine-inch brookie is a trophy, playing fish from the reel isn’t a common occurrence. And you’ll never see your backing. But if you play in the salt, or anywhere else fish are measured in pounds and not inches, having a capable drag system can mean the difference between landing fish and burnt palms.