Having complete control over our line, leader and fly makes the process of fly fishing a whole lot of fun. It also contributes significantly to our angling success. If you’re happy with the current state of your casting, read no further. Simply enjoy your time on the water. But if you sense that your casting experience could be more rewarding—in tactile pleasure as well as in catching more fish—here are some thoughts on advancing your skills.
Practice is essential to improving any physical skill. We don’t often think of fishing as requiring practice, but the fact is it’s no different than any other sport. Becoming a competent fly caster requires time and repetition, and sound fundamentals should be at the heart of any casting practice regimen. If you’re unsure what efficient casting fundamentals look like, or feel like, I suggest seeking professional instruction before spending time practicing. There’s little future in reinforcing inefficient mechanics, because at some point those inefficiencies always come back to haunt us.
A crucial but rarely talked about aspect of practice involves vision. Developing the ability to watch our line unroll as we cast it (on every forward stroke and occasionally on the backcast) is essential to making progress as a caster. That’s because the shape and behavior of the unrolling line provide the clues necessary to judge the integrity of our stroke, and inform us of the exact adjustments to make if something is off. Learning to hold and quickly shift our gaze between the unrolling loop and our target is vitally important to becoming a proficient caster.
Given an understanding of efficient mechanics and control over where we’re looking, how might we go about practicing? I suggest beginning with sessions of 10-30 minutes, a couple times a week. (Three sessions is better than two, one better than none.) If time is a constraint, a session as short as 5 minutes is still valuable—it’s amazing how many reps you can make in just 5 minutes of concentrated practice. When practicing, if you find you’re having so much fun (you should be) and feel that longer or more frequent sessions are productive, please have at it. And practice at whatever time of day suits you best.
Use the most visible fly line you can find for practice. Bright orange works well under most light conditions (and is perfectly fine for fishing). Take pride in the leader you use—it should be a professional design, identical to what you will use for fishing. Tie some yarn or a fly with the hook cut off to the tippet. Saltwater anglers should practice with a fly similar in size and weight to what will be fished, minus the hook.
Devote a few minutes at the start of every practice session to reinforcing good fundamentals. Casting in a vertical or near-vertical casting plane, 20-40 feet, into the wind, straightening out line and leader completely and turning your fly over a few inches above the grass/water, false casts included, will always test your fundamentals.
The most productive practice sessions are variable, mixed up. This means making different kinds of casts at varying distances, at all angles to the wind, with the rod held at various angles to the ground on both sides of the body. This mixed up practice, with no more than a few minutes devoted to any one type of cast, keeps our interest from flagging and is far more enjoyable than blocked practice (doing the same thing over and over and over). And it’s been proven to improve learning. Plus, the real world demands that our strokes constantly adjust in order to deal with whatever conditions we find ourselves fishing in.
For trout anglers a practice session could incorporate any combination of the following:
- Straight line, vertical plane casts at 20, 30, 40, 50-foot targets of various sizes. Practice each distance individually, and practice extending and shortening line between these distances via false casting.
- Straight line casts with the rod held at various angles to the ground, from horizontal on the casting arm side, through vertical, to horizontal on the opposite side.
- Straight line casts at all angles to the ground in headwinds, tailwinds, sidewinds.
- Reach casts, at various distances and wind directions.
- Pile casts, incorporating slack of varying amounts, at various distances.
- Weighted streamer/nymph casting at different distances and with changes of direction.
- Roll casts, at various distances and angles to the grass/water.
- Where appropriate, false casting/shooting line/double hauling can be worked into many of these casts.
Saltwater anglers might consider the following:
- Straight line casts from 20-80 feet, at a target, while changing distances and direction with as few false casts as possible. Make sure to practice with the rod canted at various angles to the grass/water.
- Straight line casts, 20-80 feet, starting each cast with fly in hand, and minimizing false casts. Vary the angle of the rod to the grass/water, and practice slight changes of direction while false casting (to simulate leading fish as they move).
- Practice varying the trajectory of your forward casts. Trajectory controls how your fly impacts the water.
- Understand the mechanics behind hauling and practice double hauling extensively. Practice shooting a controlled amount of line, on the backcast and forward cast, while hauling.
- Practice stripping, both for speed in order to pick up and make a new cast, and for refining various fly retrieve patterns (slow, fast, long, short, jerky, etc.).
- Practice all of the above in the wind. Strong wind. Headwind, tailwind, sidewind—it’s important to be able to handle any of these on a second’s notice at varying distances.
Whether you fish freshwater, saltwater or both, not every practice session needs to include all of the above. Just be sure to mix it up, constantly. A small amount of extra time spent working on the casts you use most, and the ones you find hardest to accomplish, will prove beneficial. Regardless of how you structure any given session, pay attention to your mechanics. Those should never go astray, no matter what type of fishing you’re doing.
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