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Understanding Casting

67K views 843 replies 29 participants last post by  myriad 
#1 · (Edited)
*** This post is still in development and will be substantially changed during the discussions that follow below. At the moment it's just a collection of stuff that hopefully people might find useful, it will get more organised as we go on.***

If you have any interesting information/vides please contribute.

Come back regularly!

You can't understand casting without doing it - a lot. But that doesn't mean you can't educate yourself about the theory of it, listen to what expert casters say and watch how they do it.

Before we start, let it be known that the site...

www.sexyloops.com

... Is the place that contains more information about casting than anywhere else on this planet or any others that may yet be found. It's populated by a bunch of extraordinarily talented and enthusiastic nerds people that have been responsible for a very large part of the development and understanding of fly casting and learning.

What follows is largely a tribute to what Paul Arden and others has achieved with that site, and, more than is really polite, cribs from it extensively.

Casting Instructional Videos

Paul Arden at SexyLoops

The ultimate fly bum, Paul Arden manages to make a living from fly fishing and rod making (his is the rather eccentrically named Hot Torpedo brand). He's a great instructor and caster. Currently living on a boat in Malaysia, Paul claims to be averaging 330+ days per year fishing and is well on his way to his target of 10,000 fishing days.

Paul Arden Video Casting Masterclasses
https://www.sexyloops.com/flycast/

Simon Gawseworth at RIO
My other favourite casting instructor, often thought of as a double-handed rod casting guy but can cast everything well. He's written two excellent books on both single and double-handed casting (tho' the single-handed book is out of print). Currently works for RIO.

RIO Casting Videos (click on the "How to" Video dropdown)
https://www.rioproducts.com/learn/videos

Joan Wulff at Winston
Included here not just because she's literally a world class caster and instructor but also to demonstrate that physical power is not what makes a great caster.

Joan Wulff Casting Videos
https://winstonrods.com/videos/instructional-videos/

Peter Kutzer at Orvis
Orvis uses Peter to create a series of useful and straightforward casting videos.

Peter Kutzer - Orvis

There's also a series of Peter's videos on Youtube. Look to the right of this page under "Mix - The Orvis company.


Jim Green
This is an ancient video of Jim Green who designed rods for Fenwick and Sage back in the transition from Fibreglass to Carbon. It's here because he describes and demonstrates the overhead cast really well.



Doug Swisher
He's here because I couldn't resist the name. He lands 3lb browns in his left hand whilst holding his rod in the other. He also apparently has an 'educated, micro-second wrist' - and some interesting casts in his advanced video.



Theory
Better start with Bill Gammel's 5 Essentials as they've been incredibly influential in the teaching and development of fly casting.

1. The Straight Line Path (SLP)
The rod tip must travel along a straight line when viewed from the side and from above.

2. Varying the casting arc
Vary the size of the casting arc according to the amount of line outside the rod tip.

3. The Pause
The pause between each cast to allow the line to straighten must get longer as the line gets longer (correct timing). Learn to vary the timing and the stroke length to maintain the straight-line path of the rod tip.

4. Correct application of power
The power must be applied at the proper place, at the proper time. (Smooth acceleration to an abrupt stop.)

5. Removing slack
Slack must be kept to a minimum.

It's worth pointing out that the 5 Es aren't laws and they're not totally literal. For example the casting arc when viewed from the side can never be a dead straight line, but a SLP is something we try to get as near to for as long as possible.

There are also casts that we make that deliberately break the straight line path to achieve a particular goal eg steeple cast, pendulum cast, Belgium cast.

We can deliberately overpower a cast too, eg the curve cast. We can even deliberately create a tailing loop to collapse a cast. But you get the idea; get the basic cast right first.

If you want to see someone breaking the SLP into small pieces yet chucking a line a long way:

Long article on casting by Paul Arden
Covering pretty much everything


Loading a rod and levers and springs
People commonly speak about loading a rod; they say that they can feel the rod load when casting. It's a very common word and you'll see it used in most magazines, books and videos and whenever people meet to talk about casting.

Load is a straightforward term meaning to apply a force to something; in this case our rod. We feel the load we're applying force to in our arm as a resistance or heaviness. We feel the rod bend into the cast. It provides a very useful feedback loop for training ourselves into applying the force at the right moment and with the right amount.

But some years ago it was not a simple statement to say that we load a rod. There were many rows and friendships lost over the word 'load' and in some circles it's become a trigger word; a little bit toxic. So I'd better just explain why so that people don't fall into the same ephalump trap. The wounds have not yet healed.

The problem seems to be that some people imagined the rod to be only a long spring; loading it (ie applying force) stored energy in the rod and stopping the rod sharply released that energy, propelling the line forward (or backward).

A spring stores and releases energy - compressing a spring or stretching elastic fills them with potential energy just dying to be released. To use a catapult you stretch the elastic, storing energy, and when you release it you watch the stone fly forward using the energy you stored in it. But the bow and arrow cast is, in fact, the only example of the rod being used entirely like a spring.

The other tribe believed the rod to be only a lever. In the case of a lever, the force (load) we apply by the hand rotating a small distance, makes the tip of the rod move a relatively large distance. Because the tip moves further than the hand but in the same period of time it is forced to move faster accelerating the line.

This is called mechanical advantage and it's why dog walkers use those long ball launchers and why medieval trebuchets can lob a boulder over a castle's ramparts. Up to a point, the longer the arm of the lever, the greater the distance or weight that can be thrown. For a single-handed rod, that point seems to be around 9' to 9'6" in expert hands. Double-handed rods change the game because the two-handed stroke can exert more rotational force for longer and so also throw heavier and longer.

We now know that the casting stroke uses both lever and spring mechanics during the cast with the lever contributing by far the most, particularly in shorter casts.

There's some evidence that the spring contributes more as longer casts are made - perhaps 80:20, lever:spring. Here's the source paper.


So lever wins by a long margin, but spring is present and very necessary - it adds a little extra umph to the cast at the right place (the end) and it smooths out the cast protecting our joints from sharp shocks.

There's nothing wrong with the term "load", we just need to understand its generalised meaning.

The End (fat chance!)

Soon Lee - Fly Casting Loop Dynamics

This is an excellent series of short (5 mins) animated videos of how the rod tip and line moves in real life. He demonstrates that the Straight Line Path (SLP) is a rather more complicated thing than we thought and what is actually happening in the stop.

1. Fly Casting Loops Dynamics - Introduction to Loops


2. Fly Casting Loops Dynamics - Understanding Your Fly Cast


3. Fly Casting Loops Dynamics - The Legacy of a Definition


4. Fly Casting Loops Dynamics - Ist SLP Phantom


5. Fly Casting Loops Dynamics - SLP And Essentials


6. Fly Casting Loops Dynamics - Understanding Loop Dynamics


7. Convex Tip Path


Analysing the casting stroke
Great paper comparing expert, intermediate and beginner's casting strokes using an instrument that measures the speed of the rod. Figure 5 below shows how metronomic the expert's casting is, but also how the back cast is a mirror image of the forward cast.


1632565273447.png


Miscellaneous Online Information
Fly Fishers International, the US instructors' association, publish a quarterly online magazine called The Loop that generally has a few good articles in it.

The Loop Magazine
https://www.flyfishersinternational...ing-Instructor-Certification/The-Loop-Journal

Mark Herron - The Curious Fly Caster

Mark has written a really excellent series of artcles on the physics and biomechanical aspects of fly casting. He's done a lot of scholarly research and rendered it into (mostly) understandable chunks for the non-expert. He also happens to be a member of this forum.
https://thecuriousflycaster.com/articles/physics-for-fly-casting-the-einstein-series-5/
Article about Casting styles

Casting Faults

Good casters can deliberately use techniques that are normally called faults to produce particular kinds of 'presentation' casts. So to be clear, for the purposes of what follows, to be a casting fault, the caster must have made the movement unintentionally and the cast must have been the poorer for it.

(If you're doing a a cast unintentionally that turns out to be a corker, you may have invented a new one and we want to hear about it!)

Definitions
Also to be clear, in order to understand what faults in casting are it's necessary to define terms. I'll (mostly) be using the IFFF's definitions found here:


Unfortunately, like much of fly fishing, there isn't universal acceptance of these definitions and Paul Arden and his associates at Sexyloops have an alternative view which is worth a look.


There is also a discussion about the continued fight over definitions and its history here:

Creep
Creep according to the FFI is "Rod rotation during the pause in the direction of the next cast."
(You'll find a sketch in the link above from the FFI.) If you watch Simon Gawseworth's video at 4 minutes in, you'll see him demonstrate it and hear him describe it as a "nemesis" for the fly caster.

The effect of creep is to shorten the length of the next cast. Consequently the next cast either lacks power and fails or, if the caster attempts to compensate by punching the cast forward, a tailing loop can result (see below).

Simon actually demonstrates translational creep (the hand moving forward horizontally) but I think most instructors say that ANY movement forward - translation or rotation (the hand turning the rod in an arc) - during the pause in the casting stroke is creep.

Unfortunately, according to FFI definitions, when the forward movement is translational it can also be called drag, not creep.

This seems unnecessarily complicated and confused to me especially as a similar movement in the direction of the unfolding loop is called drift (rotational OR translational.) But I guess they have their reasons.

The cure for creep
First it has to be identified, which might not be easy without somebody that knows what they're doing looking at you - remember you're making this movement unconsciously. But once identified, the cure is to force yourself to very deliberately pause, maybe exaggerate and do it for longer. You'll need someone watching you. One instructor tells her students to shout "DON"T MOVE" at the pause. Sounds like it could work.

If you google cures for creep you'll see many of the world's best casters recommending using the movement called drift (as above) in order to compensate for it. I don't think that this is terribly good advice - he says not being one the world's best casters, but hear me out.

First off, drift is a fairly advanced move used mostly by distance casters. What they're doing is making the cast, stopping the rod, then during the pause as the loop unfurls, moving their rod a little further back and upwards. This increases the width of the next cast which is valuable if you want more power and distance. But what if you don't?

Second, the object is to cure the fault, not leave it in place and cover it up with another action. Learning to stop and stay stopped is so important it's worth getting right I reckon. You can add drift later if you want to. (In my view.)

Tailing Loops

If creep is a fault you don't know you have, tailing loops are a fault you very definitely know ALL about when you make one because they tend to make a mess of your leader.

A formal definition of a tailing loop is where the line on top of the loop dips and crosses the bottom of the loop twice (ie the fly leg of the line crosses the rod leg twice.) It looks like this:

1631625251195.png


I suspect the definition has the requirement to cross the rod leg twice to distinguish it from the perfectly ok cast where the fly leg has sagged on the backcast and it coming up from under rod leg.

1632679359507.png


But that formal definition isn't terribly useful because a tail doesn't have to cross twice to be a problem. A tail that is simply a dip in the fly leg can escalate into something big enough to destroy the cast. These small dips are usually called tailing tendencies.

If the legs of the fly line collide, you get a loop that falls in a pile, often a tangle and occasionally a knot in the leader called a wind knot. How a wind knot forms is interesting in a nerdy way, but I've never seen it explained so I'll add my version of it later.

Tailing loops have been researched to death, so best just read Sexyloops' explanations.


But not all demonstrations of tailing loops actually are tailing loops and it's bothered me for a while that when I've seen people throw them, they looked quite artificial to me. Their casts don't look like my casts when I tail and get into a mess. Turns out I'm not alone:


Anyway, this has also been murdered at Sexyloops. Unfortunately it's not yet properly dead

How "Wind" Knots are Formed
It ain't the wind.

I've looked for a good explanation of how the knots are made but not found one; most account just say that they're caused by tailing loops but not how. So here's my best effort.

In the classic tailing loop the flyline leg crosses the rod leg of the fly line twice. But just once would do.

1631551559484-png.png

For that action to create an overhand knot in the line two other things have to happen:

1. one part of the tailing loop must be on one side of the fly leg and one on the other. ie the fly leg and the rod leg of the fly line have crossed. In a knot that's called an elbow

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2. somehow the fly must have entered the crossed-leg loop to make the knot - the 'working end' has to pass through the 'elbow'. A loop that has simply crossed/collided would make a mess but not necessarily form an overhand knot.

For 2. to happen the fly must have travelled faster than the crossed loop so as to enter it and then exit it, forming the knot. But the fly can never be moving faster than the loop ahead of it, because it's the loop that's 'towing' the fly. (This is contentious, what's actually happening at the loop is complicated, but let's go with the analogy for a while.)

The fly can't go faster than the loop unless the crossed loop has slowed down. eg. Car, A, is towing Car B and both are doing 30mph. If Car A suddenly brakes and slows down to 10mph and Car B doesn't also brake, Car B will carry on at 30mph until it either collides with car A or overtakes it.

And it seems that that is what is happening; it's the collision of the fly line legs that slows the fly line in the air, and the momentum that is already in the fly carries it onwards straight through the slowing collided loop. Shazam.


It's probable that there's more than one mechanism that creates the knot. Another likely one is that when the collision has happened the fly drops onto the mess of leader and line lying on the water, and sinks through it, creating the knot which tightens when false casted.

And just on occasion, the wind might blow the fly into the loop.

Weird Casts
Tongariro Roll Cats

Just plonking this here for now

Teaching & Casting Organisations

I was surprised to see how lacking in content both of the UK Instructor's Associations are. What little there is appears to be behind the members' enclosure but even there, there's not much of interest (at least on the GAIA site, I haven't seen behind the curtain of AAPGAI). It seems a missed opportunity. Anyway, I include them here as they are good at pointing you to qualified instructors.

(btw why do we have two instructors' association? They're both tiny organisations doing exactly the same thing. If they got together they'd have half the costs but twice the revenue and be able to do more for their members.)

Game Angling Instructors' Association (UK), GAIA
https://gameanglinginstructors.co.uk

Association of Advanced Professional Game Angling Instructors (UK), AAPGAI
https://www.aapgai.co.uk

The Americans put on a better show:

Fly Fishing International (USA), FFI
https://www.flyfishersinternational.org/

Other organisations of interest

British Fly Casting Club
https://www.thebfcc.co.uk

Scottish Game Anglers' Association
http://www.sana.org.uk

International Casting Sport Federation

The Fly Casting Institute
Preparation for the GAIC and APGAI Assessments
Recommended Study Material


Books
Videos & DVDs
Joan Wulff:
Fly Casting Techniques
Casting Accuracy

Lefty Kreh:
Advanced Fly-Casting
Solving Fly-Casting Problems
Modern Fly-Casting Methods
Longer Fly-Casting
Saltwater Fly-Casting Techniques

Mel Krieger: The Essence of Fly-Casting
Jason Borger: The Nature of Fly-Casting

Ed Jawarowski:
The Cast
Trouble shooting the Cast

G.V. Roberts: Master the Cast
Macauley Lord: Flycasting Handbook
Mac Brown: Casting Angles

Al Kyte:
Orvis Guide to better Flycasting
Fly Fishing Simple to Sophisticated

Simon Gawesworth:
Single Handed Spey Casting
Spey casting

Hugh Falkus:
Salmon Fishing
Sea Trout Fishing

Malcolm Greenhalgh: Fishing Flies
A Guide to Flies from around the World.

Oliver Edwards: Flytyers Masterclass

Darrel Martin: Micropatterns

Jeremy Lucas: Tactical Fly Fishing
Joan Wulff's Dynamics of Fly Casting

Fly Casting with Lefty Kreh

Mel Krieger:
The Essence of Spey Casting
Flycasting Faults and Fixes

Michael Evans:
Trout Fishing and Fly Casting
Spey Casting and Salmon Fishing

Rio Modern Spey Casting

Scott McKenzie's Spey Casting Masterclass

Ally Gowans: Spey Casting Made Easy

Oliver Edwards;
Essential Skills series
Essential Patterns series

Malcolm Greenhalgh:
Fly Tying and Fly Fishing Masterclass series

Gary Borger:
15 Most Common Casting Errors

Doug Swisher:
Advanced Fly Casting

Instructors recommended by forum members

Robin Elwes
Www.learn2yfish.com for contact details
Areas: London, Reading (sports fish) and the Test
AAPGAI single handed master
double handed master.
Been Farlows main casting instructor since 1988
Recommended by Whingeing Pom

Parked for the moment
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#2 · (Edited)
As a piece of history, here's a piece from The Loop Magazine on

HOW "THE FIVE ESSENTIALS" BECAME DOGMA

by Macauley Lord


In 1997, some of the CI candidates I was testing began reciting the numbered "essentials" from Jay and Bill Gammel's The Essentials of Fly-Casting. When I asked why, they repeatedly said something like this: "The [then] FFF wants us to teach the Five Essentials." I would tell them that that was not the case, only that the Gammels' book was a great casting book, as were Joan Wulff's and Mel Krieger's. If they had repeated Lefty Kreh's "Five Principles" instead, which pre-dated the Gammels' Five Essentials, I still would have asked why. This article discusses the happenstance of why so many instructors still hold the Gammels' Five Essentials as sacrosanct instead of, for example, Lefty's Five Principles. (Lefty later amended them to four). More broadly, it illustrates one way in which we teach some of what we teach without questioning it, and the role that perceived authority plays in it.

In an article in the Summer 2016 issue of The Loop, MCI Sekhar Bahadur asked Bill how The Essentials became a cornerstone of the Casting Instructor Certification Program. Bill replied:

I don't know exactly. This may sound boastful, but I don't mean it to be. Jim Green told me at a Conclave in Livingston, Montana, that we had written in 24 pages what everyone else had tried
to write in 300. If that was the sentiment in the room, then they probably believed that it was as good a summary as anyone would write. The casting program never truly adopted it as far as I know. It really just became part of the fabric of casting instruction of the FFF because over time so many people began to speak of the Essentials.


Actually, the Five Essentials became a cornerstone because
of happenstance. Seeking to raise the performance of its testing candidates, the Casting Board of Governors needed a study guide for the CI Test. As the editor of The Loop at that time (in 1996 or '97), I volunteered to write it. In it, I recommended three casting books to aspiring Certified Casting Instructors: Joan Wulff's, Mel Krieger's and the Gammels' pamphlet. Why the Gammels? Bill and I had become good friends, and we talked often about casting and teaching and our families. Bill lamented that their pamphlet had gotten little attention after the FFF had agreed to publish it and sell it for a dollar. So, greatly admiring Bill's casting and teaching, and liking very much, as I still do, the content of the pamphlet, I recommended it in the Study Guide. It never dawned on me or anyone else on the Board that the concepts (the now-iconic Five Essentials) in the first part of it would become dogma, taught unquestioningly and by rote to beginners.

The FFF office sent the Study Guide to all who inquired about testing, and there were many CI test candidates in those early years of the program. Many recipients of the Study Guide subsequently ordered the Gammels' pamphlet. Within just a few months, I was hearing directly from CI candidates whom I tested and trained that the Gammels' pamphlet was how the FFF expected them to teach casting. (After all, the FFF's imprimatur was on the book itself.) This was, of course, not my intention in the Study Guide, nor was it ever remotely the intention of the Board of Governors. Perhaps everyone now on the Board and nearly all active MCIs were certified in an era when the unquestioned assumption was that the Gammels' pamphlet was "the FFF way." And that's how we got to where we are today, with the Five Essentials being taught to many beginners around the world because of mere happenstance.

For Bill's high-school graduation present, his father Jay gave him a two-hour lesson with now 12-time world champion Chris Korich in San Francisco. Chris remembers that those two hours turned into a whole day. And there was much discussion of the kernel of what became the Five Essentials. Chris says of that day that he never imagined that what became the Five Essentials would be taught as such to beginners. A Governor-Emeritus who has mentored a generation of high-level casting instructors told me, "I don't even know the Five Essentials." A world-renowned Governor-Emeritus says that he has tired of hearing instructors say what they think they're supposed to say - "the Five Essentials blah blah blah" - to someone of his stature. It's not at all that he doesn't like the book: it's that he rejects the dogmatic imposition of the Five Essentials on casters by people like us. He adds, "I wish the Five Essentials had never been invented."

If you think this isn't really a problem, a CBOG told me with astonishment that he knows a CI who begins every beginner class with a 45-minute discussion of the Five Essentials. In addition, an Examiner told me that he doesn't really care what else CI candidates do on Task 16 - teaching the pickup/laydown - so long as they talk about the Five Essentials. Recall that this task is geared toward teaching beginners. But another CBOG told me recently that Examiners think it's inappropriate to teach the Five Essentials to beginners. Clearly, there is an inconsistency here, and it is not trivial. This begs the question: if the Five Essentials aren't appropriate to teach to a beginner, why are they appropriate for people who can already cast?

At their best, they are a software program that runs in the background. Just like the Six-Step Method, they silently inform our teaching without becoming audible to our students. The most powerful teaching is that in which we talk the least.

Bill Gammel and I first met on a street corner in Livingston, Montana, in, I think, 1996. We were both attending what the FFF then called the "Conclave." I was a newly minted CBOG and Bill was a year away from joining the Board. We did some casting together, and he told me about the pamphlet he had written with his father, Jay. Bill's casting was amazing in that he could imitate The Great Ones.

In the space of perhaps a minute, he cast the stylistic differences between Joan Wulff and Lefty Kreh. I think he also modeled the subtle differences between Jim Green and Mel Krieger. It was a tour-de-force of casting. Bill was not just passionate about casting, but also about teaching. He spoke of all the time that he and his father had spent filming the greats, analyzing their footage and then mimicking them. They may have been the first fly-casting film-rats, as we now see in the National Football League and other major sports.

Bill told me once that he teaches his beginner students to cast first and, once they are making fishable casts, he teaches them the Five Essentials. (He now teaches them in a different order and manner from how they were originally written.) If you read the 2nd half of Bill and Jay's book - start with the last sentence on p.11, beyond the part about the Five Essentials - you'll see that it refers only parenthetically to the Essentials, and it is an excellent casting book. It's very simple, and it is a paragon of straight-forward instruction. You'll see that once the Gammels get the theory off their chests and decide to teach their readers how to actually make the casts, they do it directly, simply
and wonderfully. That's the part of the Gammels' legacy that most deserves to be shared with beginners.

The author thanks CBOG-E Bill Gammel, MCI's Sekhar Bahadur and Craig Buckbee and CBOG Jim Sommercorn for their assistance with this article. The conclusions are the author's alone. Macauley Lord is an Emeritus member of the Casting Board of Governors and a former editor of The Loop. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Casting Instruction in 2011.

1). https://flyfishersinternational.org/Portals/0/Documents/Casting/The Loop/2016.SUMMER.LOOP.pdf?ver=2016-07-26-174814-000

2). Jim Green was a founding CBOG Member, the Fenwick rod designer, and World Casting Champion at age 17.

3). As of this writing, Chris Korich has coached 15-year-old Maxine McCormick to her two world championships in accuracy-casting. In competition, she has beaten both Chris and Steve Rajeff.

4).The Casting Board of Governors' Jay Gammel Award recognizes individuals who have developed instructional materials that advanced fly casting instruction whether or not they are an FFI member.

 
#3 ·
I watched videos just the other day on the double haul featuring Peter Kutzer of Orvis and Simon Gawesworth of Rio among others. It’s about time I got to grips with the dh and I thought both these blokes broke it down very well.
B
 
#5 ·
I watched videos just the other day on the double haul featuring Peter Kutzer of Orvis and Simon Gawesworth of Rio among others. It's about time I got to grips with the dh and I thought both these blokes broke it down very well.
B
The advice from SG to use a shooting head with nylon backing is great. You will really progress quickly. This was the standard method for teaching D/H at his Dad's (later Simon's) school in Devon.
 
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#9 ·
I was surprised to see how lacking in content both of the UK Instructor's Associations are.
The bit you don't see perhaps is how active they are at events, probably because they tend to be for their members/instructors, they are their events, for them, bit like a teachers convention, but what they do most is cast, and talk about..casting, these resources are not open to learners generally because learners are considered best taught by instructors.

Having been to a few I always thought it would be useful to hold the same event but invite learners to come and learn for a small fee, everything is there to provide that and it would let people meet instructors and see what they do or can provide.
 
#10 ·
The bit you don't see perhaps is how active they are at events, probably because they tend to be for their members/instructors, they are their events, for them, bit like a teachers convention, but what they do most is cast, and talk about..casting, these resources are not open to learners generally because learners are considered best taught by instructors.
Sure, but why not do both?
Having been to a few I always thought it would be useful to hold the same event but invite learners to come and learn for a small fee, everything is there to provide that and it would let people meet instructors and see what they do or can provide.
My first guess is that they are just too small and maybe too self-obsessed to broaden their reach. And why two tiny organisations?
 
#11 ·
Like hitting a golf ball, serving at tennis, throwing a javelin, or countless other sporting actions, professional coaching will always pay dividends in flycasting.
So if you haven't had a lesson, why not?
The usual answer is "I can can cast fine, thank you!" when in reality we could all do with some coaching - even the casting instructors amongst us.
I had a long lay-off from regular flyfishing and it has taken 18 months of at least weekly casting (not including fishing sessions) to get back to somewhere near where I was in my 20's. I am having fun learning over with my wrong hand as well. There is always something to learn...
 
#13 ·
Like hitting a golf ball, serving at tennis, throwing a javelin, or countless other sporting actions, professional coaching will always pay dividends in flycasting.
So if you haven't had a lesson, why not?
The usual answer is "I can can cast fine, thank you!" when in reality we could all do with some coaching - even the casting instructors amongst us.
Casting instructors are the most coached and driven to improve casters, I think it's just because they are used to it and know who and where to go to do it, also they identify more precisely what they need and know when they need someone to look at it.
It is a different interaction though from teaching a beginner, way more focus and a lot more swearing :)
 
#24 ·
What Brian is saying is that GAIA does not teach members to cast, neither does it instruct instructors about how to instruct. These are GAIA's key aims;

GAIA's four key aims are:

  • To establish and maintain a high standard of technical and practical knowledge and skills for game angling instruction/coaching.
  • To administer and manage GAIA's awards and to support high standards of technical competence in such other awards and certification for game angling coaches/instructors that may at any time involve the Association.
  • To promote GAIA and the professional integrity of its Members.
  • To establish GAIA as a recognised professional organisation for game angling both nationally and internationally.

To achieve this with regard to the casting element of our activities we have 2 syllabi against which members are assessed for certification as a GAIA Instructor - GAIC (GAIA INSTRUCTOR'S CERTIFICATE) and the APGAI (ADVANCED PROFESSIONAL GAME ANGLING INSTRUCTOR ).

It is the member / associate member's responsibility to achieve the standards required with the syllabus they will be assessed against, GAIA does not, as an organisation, 'teach'. Occasionally - rarely within the last couple of years! - we get together with an annual meeting or there will be locally arranged, regional gatherings, where we can share experiences, discuss aspects of the syllabus / curriculum and practice together. The only other times we meet are when we provide casting instruction at Game Fairs and shows.

The journey to instructor qualification is mostly a solitary one, the vast amount of practice is on your own but . . . and it's a big but . . . the journey is so much smoother if you have, hopefully, local access to an experienced, qualified instructor who from time to time can act as a mentor, talk through the language of the syllabus with you and explain in detail the criteria assessors will be checking when assessing performance.
 
#33 · (Edited)
But that doesn't mean you can't educate yourself about the theory of it, listen to what expert casters say and watch how they do it. Understanding the why, helps with the how.
I like to consider myself as a reasonable caster, I'm not a casting instructor (although I will coach people who are serious about distance casting) - I'm a full time physicist at one of the UK's leading research sites.

As such, I think I'm well placed to say that there's a lot of absolute bollox written on the subject of casting theory and from some very well known sources.

It frustrates me that these great casters don't just stick to what they know, i.e. how to move the rod and line to get the best results, what it feels like to them etc. Instead they often use pseudo-science to try and convey that they know more than they do (there are some spectacular examples of this over on Facebook). This is obviously usually accompanied with a sales pitch.

So, I wish you well with this endeavour, but ask about how you are going to 'peer review' your findings. I've long given up pulling people up on non-sensical physics as the usual response is along the lines of 'you're a nobody and I've heard of this guy in fishing circles so he must be right'.

James.
 
#43 ·
This is an interesting thread from a number of perspectives. Will throw into the ring my take on a few of them knowing that I will try and fail to be brief - because, folks, it's not simple.

The Best way to Get Better
Beyond question the best way to improve your casting is to find a good casting teacher and take lessons from them. (Notice I didn't say "instructor" and will get back to that anon.)

I say that as someone who has been casting for more than thirty years and has had no more than a handful of lessons. Why so few? Because I happen to enjoy discovering and learning things for myself, especially when it comes to fly fishing. Also, when I started this journey there were SFA qualified casting instructors in Oz. Make of that what you will.

The Physics (Mechanics) of Fly Casting
Yes, for sure, there has been and is still a lot of crap talked about this subject. (I'll get to why I think that is so a little later.) To put it bluntly, the crap comes from people who want to big up what they know fly casting by talking about physics, a subject of which they often have limited knowledge. Half truths become indisputable fact. It also comes from people who want to big up what they know about physics by talking about fly casting. Technical obscurantism often conceals fallacy. Neither variety of crap is helpful to people (like me) who find the significant "why" questions both interesting and essential to learning to cast better.

There is also a more nuanced perspective which might, for example, understand that all the stuff talked about rod loading (the rod is a spring) is technically wrong but its amazing persistence as accepted fact is possibly an indication of a useful fallacy. Feeling the rod "load" is probably an aid to staying in touch with the line instead of battling with slack.

Being fed up with the physics crap, both varieties, was the motivation behind the creation of my website. Exploring that stuff lead to exploring other stuff.

Teaching Fly Casting
As a friend of mine who retired after a distinguished career as a secondary teacher and headmaster put it to me, being a good teacher requires both deep (and accurate) understanding of the subject matter and a deep understanding of how people learn.

Good teachers combine these things, knowing what to teach and how to teach it to greatest effect. He wrote: "Poor and/or inexperienced teachers will often serve up knowledge in one dimension with little regard for the meaning the student is attempting to construct from what is being delivered. Good teachers will be continuously seeking feedback from the learner in order to understand the learner's understanding. They will modify the way the knowledge is delivered based on this feedback." [Personal correspondence]

I don't know all that much about FFi qualifications (CCI, MCI and THCI) but I know enough to know that certification has little or nothing to do with the second dimension of teaching. It strikes me as being stuck in the knowledge and performance dimension and assumes that is all there is to it. That probably explains why candidates are tested and certified as instructors instead of as teachers or coaches.

So, two things shortly stated. Someone who is highly rated in the knowledge and performance dimension is not thereby automatically qualified or a desirable choice as a teacher of fly casting. I wouldn't mind having Menuhin as my violin teacher but Dali or Picasso as my art teacher? Eeek!

Secondly, the choice of "instructor" instead of "teacher" speaks to keeping things locked into a unidimensional fixation with what is to be taught and the performance capability of instructors.

Where are all the teaching (pedagogical) resources for fly casting? Let me know if you find the stash. Recently I searched for like material in tennis coaching. One association site listed 560 articles.

Small World, Closed Culture
Teaching fly casting and understanding the mechanics, biomechanics and the sensory motor learning process could be much better informed but…. Fly casting is a niche activity. Within that niche only a small portion of fly fishers actively want to improve and even fewer of that population are likely to be motivated to look beyond the received wisdom to the wisdom of other people doing other things which turn out to be relevant because they are inherently similar. Someone who would know recently told me there were only about 250 MCI's in the world. Compare golf, tennis, football, athletics etc etc. Neither the population nor the money are there to drive learning and innovation.

Long before we get to science in general or to pedagogy or to sports science in other activities the conversation is likely to be shut down. I can hear it now. "What would they know about fly fishing, much less about fly casting?"

Tradition and ethical standards have attractive upsides. They also have the darker downsides of closed culture namely, ego politics, ignorance and intellectual insecurity.

One last thing. The constraints to innovation and expansion are probably most acute and rigid in a context like fly casting instruction which has been based on the notion that finding and correcting fault(s) is the correct and indeed, only approach. Not an environment in which sticking one's head above the parapet is likely to be rewarded.

Cheers
Mark
 
#46 ·
To pick up on just a couple of your points

Where are all the teaching (pedagogical) resources for fly casting? Let me know if you find the stash. Recently I searched for like material in tennis coaching. One association site listed 560 articles.
I have said I was surprised that there is almost nothing on either instructor's associations' website to help learn more about what they purport to instruct. I'm also really surprised that there are two tiny organisation rather than one larger organisation that could do more.

It speaks a little to your other point:

Small World, Closed Culture
I don't know what's going on there, was there one that split into two - an ideological schism? But it seems that both organisations do pretty much exactly the same stuff. It's not like there are two strikingly different dogmas. Anybody know the history?
 
#45 ·
According to casting lore there are 5 essentials of fly casting

Straight Line Path.
Vary The Casting Arc.
Timing and Pause.
Correct Power Application.
Reduction of Slack.

There are exceptions to some of them and at least one of them is an approximation but there seems more sense there than bollox?
 
#47 ·
According to casting lore there are 5 essentials of fly casting
Morning Tangled, I take it you concede that the orgs do not teach you to Teach, and only qualify you?

There are other Organisations in the Uk that help you on your way. You can do a Coaching course.This is a generic course that covers amongst other things,how to set up a lesson plan or how to do a risk assessment.You can also do SVQ's.Non of them teach you how to cast/fish.

In my experience teaching can be as easy as "flick the line back and then flick it forward" Happy days.Next please.If you get a guy like Harry, (Fishing Hobo)who has a real passion for Casting/Fishing/Teaching,who wants to learn, then it is easy.Despite being a really busy(hero) in his day job,he dedicated a lot of his valuable free time to attending coaching days.He is willing to ask and he eats every word you say or every cast you do.A really intellegent man who has a hidden talent that just needed an airing.He will also question things and ask "why" a certain thing works,or doesn't.Or it can be really difficult.People who know it all ,close their mind or will not practice, make it impossible for an Instructor. Keep in mind that not all "Instructors" Teach,nor do they fish! Strange eh? I know some who last fished when Teeny Nymphs came on the market.But hey ho.

There are guys like James or Lasse Karlson,who come on here(even better face to face) and offer their expert opinions.We should digest(almost) everything these guys, and others, say and it is free.Everyone a winner. I am not great with Physics but I do have people I can contact who teach me (in ***** terms) when i need to know how something is working. If there was BFCC events in Scotland I would attend.....in a heartbeat.

The SLP ???

After talking to another Instructor about the Arc/Stroke Adjustments.I decided to have a real look at other peoples. Most Anglers, and some Instructors/Coaches, do not make any adjustment to their casting stroke.They have a default stroke/Arc, and never change it whether they are a casting 20ft or 60ft.They have real problems with this and the resultant faults they develop because of it. This is in any casts ,including Spey casting. Go ahead,have a look and see what you think.
 
#56 ·
Videos are very difficult to see what is being done in my opinion. When you have guys like Brian instructing you it seems easy. When you see these guys cast you want to try to be a step closer to their ability. Some of you might rember there was a thread on rollcasting I started some years ago, it quickly got into an argument talking about the anchor and its function. You know what, when I first attended his group lesson he just made it so easy, until then I couldn't get my head around how to roll cast. You don't need to get all technical. Instructing, teaching I don't think is much different. You have to get the point across to the learner in a way they understand. Making it complex isn't going to help those who want to learn.
 
#59 ·
Videos are very difficult to see what is being done in my opinion.
They have several problems; just to name my personal gripe, they never say how much line they have out when making the casts.
Some of you might rember there was a thread on rollcasting I started some years ago, it quickly got into an argument talking about the anchor and its function.
I read that whole board before posting here. The inevitable happened but in between the bile and agro there was some useful discussion.
You know what, when I first attended his group lesson he just made it so easy, until then I couldn't get my head around how to roll cast. You don't need to get all technical. Instructing, teaching I don't think is much different. You have to get the point across to the learner in a way they understand. Making it complex isn't going to help those who want to learn.
Lessons are by far the easiest way of learning; guided fishing days are good too. But there comes a time when you can do most things ok and want to get deeper into it. Well at last I do. I'm interested in the why as much as the how and for that you do need to get into the theory. It's not for everyone of course.
 
#61 ·
For me, which was sifting dross for a year to find the useful, Loops magazine, particularly the links in it, was a pretty good foundation, there is dross in there too but good individual timeless articles, then Sexyloops, the older threads if they can still be found, it's pretty thorough and Paul Arden doesn't get enough credit for how influential this was at the time.
Some swear by the original Joan Wulff fly casting techniques book, it was probably the original casting manual and due credit there but I found it basic.

Ed Jaworowski's Perfect cast I found brilliant, simple and not much to it but covers a lot in good detail, a sort of quick but advanced level book.

I had Jason Borger's book, Nature of Fly Casting..'a modular approach' he knows his stuff but the format of the book didn't work for me, I found it harder to follow than learning without it.

Peter Hayes I think is brilliant, he has done a few vid's.

Liked Michael Mauri's CD, one of the few video's you can slow down and see what he does to replicate, possibly the only one if you want to master CAD casts, Z snaps and the like, getting into the fancy stuff there.


 
#75 ·
All this talk of SLP and tip path etc. is very confusing for folk who are trying to improve. Like some Holy Grail of higher attainment.

The thing to understand is that we need to use skeletal movements and the leverage of the rod to get the line moving fast enough and in a straight line to effect a cast. This is the same for all types of fishing.

A child flicking mud off a stick understands this....

The confounding factors in flycasting are:
1) the requirement to pull the rod away from this ideal path by whatever amount we want to effect the formation of a loop
2) the requirement to pause between forward and backward strokes to allow the line to reach the desired position
3) needing to eliminate 'slack'

Good casters do all this well, but it is really complicated to try and explain on paper.

Showing someone a good cast and explaining it and letting them try is absolutely key. No one ever learnt a good tennis serve or golf drive from any online resource.
 
#77 ·
Rich what you say is true, the line would crash into the rod if the SLP was perfectly straight all the way. So yes we need a bit of curve to get the tip out of the way. However, I would suggest we don't dispose of the baby with the bath water, the baby being that the more/longer we make the tip travel (as) straight (as possible/practical) the more efficiently we apply towing force to the line. Also because of the rod's flexibility counter flex mostly takes care of the collision problem when we stop the rod without us having to act consciously to avoid that problem.

Most people I've seen cast have too much rather than too little curve in the rod path because most of them are over-rotating because most of them are actually overpowering the cast - either way - and thus failing to apply the Force (Luke) efficiently. So for my $A0.02 the SLP is still a handy notion. One might even say that the tip path which generates tails is a move away from the SLP - concave instead of convex of course. Personally I'd stick with tails as a result of lumpy power application but you see what I'm saying.

Cheers
Mark
 
#90 ·
the baby being that the more/longer we make the tip travel (as) straight (as possible/practical) the more efficiently we apply towing force to the line.
Before this is generally accepted as gospel I have an interesting spanner to throw into the works...

What a rod does in levering is increase the movement made at the hand at the tip, small movement at the hand, longer travel at the tip, I think we would all agree with that, and the greatest amplification we can make a rod make is rotation, this is our most efficient transfer of a short movement to a longer travel.

Moving a vertical rod pulling a line through space on it's own is not efficient, in fact on it's own all it does is move rod and line a few feet forward or back, without the speed generated by rotation you wouldn't be able to keep the line in the air on a longer cast, obviously the 'straight' bit is important to the cast, it narrows what would be a giant loop from just rotation, but I would pose it's not 100% correct to talk about this in terms of efficiency in isolation to rotation.

Should say that the rules for this change dramatically between a short and long cast, in the extreme a short line will cast fine with a short straight path, it's only when you go longer things become a problem, because you need the efficiency of more rotation, this change of path/stroke is where most beginners hit a wall, the inability to adjust and lengthen the stroke in relation to the length of line they are working with.
 
#79 · (Edited)
The SLP of the rod tip is really a useful fiction then. We say it because an approximation to the SLP can create nice narrow loops. (All other things being equal.)

The next thing that bugs me a bit is saying that extending the casting arc aids the SLP. The reasoning being that as the rod shortens under increasing load of both increasing weight of line and acceleration, extending the arc eliminates a concave rod tip path and therefore prevents tailing loops. But does it in reality?

Extending the casting arc DOES reduce the chance of tails but it seems to me that it does it by smoothing out the application of power, not so much by achieving a SLP. In fact the greater the casting arc, the more convex the rod tip path must seem when viewed from the side no matter how much bending of the rod. The extreme is with the 170 cast. To describe a SLP with a near 180 degree rod arc the rod would need to shrink to a zero length.

Surely the rod tip can only describe a concave arc if it dips in midcast. And that can only happen if power is applied midcast rather than accelerating smoothly throughout the whole cast and? (Assuming the hand's translation does not dip.)

If I only have a short distance to accelerate the rod but also want to make a long cast, I find it almost impossible to do without tailing because I have to punch the rod. If I can apply force over a yard of movement I can more easily smooth out the increasing power and the cast works. Rod arc matters, but it's the timing of power application in that arc that matters.

Or so it seems to me atm :)
 
#84 ·
The next thing that bugs me a bit is saying that extending the casting arc aids the SLP. The reasoning being that as the rod shortens under increasing load of both increasing weight of line and acceleration, extending the arc eliminates a concave rod tip path and therefore prevents tailing loops. But does it in reality?
This short video may help explain what happens . . .

 
#95 ·
I really liked the towing analogy until it broke down for me. Towing implies a constant a velocity rather than an acceleration which is what's happening in a cast. We don't want the towed car to overtake us.

The videos demonstrate that it's the stop that causes the loop to form. I think of it more like a trebuchet.
 
#106 · (Edited)
Just an image that might make Tangled happy.
This was pinched from the sister site in N. America. If you look at the picture the fly leg is pretty darn straight but look carefully at the rod tip, it is not a complete straight line - there is only a short segment that you can call a true straight line.
 

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#108 ·
Just an image that might make Tangled happy.
This was pinched from the sister site in N. America. If you look at the picture the fly leg is pretty darn straight but look carrfully at the rod tip, it is not a complete straight line - there is only a short segment that you can call a true straight line.
That illustrates it pretty well, the short segment is the main part of the cast, with the rod bending to give an SLP.

I think Tangled has an image of a 170 cast like one giant rotation that curves down at each end.
 
#117 ·
I was also interested to see Soon Lee's explanation of the difference between wide loops and open loops.

I've been trying to cast his straight line wide loop but it's difficult prolonging the stop. After years of trying to get to a sharp stop, it's hard to deliberately fade to a stop.
 
#119 · (Edited)
Sitting on the side lines as a duffer watching this thread develop… and I’m sure there’s more like me. I have two questions/observations that may seem a bit thick but here goes;-
Straight line path: is this a term used for teaching as it’s an aspiration and to all intent and purpose it is virtually straight and the line follows this path. whereas if an instructor said it’s a slightly convex
path that would become the aspiration and lead to the wrong out come ?

Edit: based on below: is this term convex that your using applying to just the counter flex at the stop or throughout the cast ?

Rotation: (excuse me but I keep seeing the term but no one explaining it) are we talking about a movement of the wrist/ shoulder at each end of the cast( in tangled diagram it’s increased arc, I think this is what some term as drift ??) OR I notice some people have the wrist/forearm turned away from the body so the reel is pointing out during the casting stroke . Is this a gradual rotation in and out during the stroke ?

Sorry if it’s bleeding obvious , but some of us are relative beginners trying to keep up .
 
#121 ·
Straight line path: is this a term used for teaching as it's an aspiration and to all intent and purpose it is virtually straight and the line follows this path. whereas if an instructor said it's a slightly convex
path that would become the aspiration and lead to the wrong out come ?
This is purely my take on it so far.

The SLP is a teaching aid. It's the first of what's called the "5 Essentials" of fly casting. Being able to discuss, explain and demonstrate them to a casting test instructor is necessary to pass the test. (I'm going to pick at all the "5 E's" as we go along.)

The dogma is that in order to cast a nice tight loop the rod tip must move in a SLP (mostly in this case we're talking about the rod tip when viewed from the side, But to be an efficient cast the rod tip also needs to describe a straight line when viewed from above - ie the forward and back cast need to be aligned at 180 degrees

Slowmo of casting though show that all casts describe an arc, the most convex being at rotation (see below). This isn't to say that trying for a SLP is not correct, it's just that it's an approximation (and for me was contradicting real life) and there's maybe some very important things we need to know going on at rotation and stop too.

Edit: based on below: is this term convex that your using applying to just the counter flex at the stop or throughout the cast ?
The whole cast describes a slight arc, but the flick at the end - Joan Wulff's 'power snap', Jim Swisher's 'micro-second wrist' the wrist snap - whatever you prefer to call it - is the rotation of the hand at the end of the cast. That's producing a lot of the power in the cast and it's where the rod is acting best as a lever (small rotation of the wrist 2"? producing a 2'? movement of the rod tip and a sharp acceleration of the line as the tip speeds up.)

You can test this yourself; make a cast by just snapping your wrist over and then try it by just moving your arm forward in a straight line. One works the other doesn't much. Put them together you have a better cast than either.
Rotation: (excuse me but I keep seeing the term but no one explaining it) are we talking about a movement of the wrist/ shoulder at each end of the cast( in tangled diagram it's increased arc,
Yes
I think this is what some term as drift ??)
No, drift is different. It doesn't have a part in casting the line, it's a repositioning movement between loop formation. Here's one definition

Drift: To position the rod between casting strokes.
Moving the rod to adjust Casting Arc, Stroke Length or Casting Plane. Drift applies little or no force on the line.
OR I notice some people have the wrist/forearm turned away from the body so the reel is pointing out during the casting stroke . Is this a gradual rotation in and out during the stroke ?
I think that might just be a style thing rather than an action that makes a difference to the casting arc. But need to see it.
Sorry if it's bleeding obvious , but some of us are relative beginners trying to keep up .
This stuff is NOT obvious! I think it's pretty damn complicated and I think we're all still trying to figure it out.
 
#122 ·
Sitting on the side lines as a duffer watching this thread develop… and I'm sure there's more like me. I have two questions/observations that may seem a bit thick but here goes;-
Straight line path: is this a term used for teaching as it's an aspiration and to all intent and purpose it is virtually straight and the line follows this path. whereas if an instructor said it's a slightly convex
path that would become the aspiration and lead to the wrong out come ?

Edit: based on below: is this term convex that your using applying to just the counter flex at the stop or throughout the cast ?

Rotation: (excuse me but I keep seeing the term but no one explaining it) are we talking about a movement of the wrist/ shoulder at each end of the cast( in tangled diagram it's increased arc, I think this is what some term as drift ??) OR I notice some people have the wrist/forearm turned away from the body so the reel is pointing out during the casting stroke . Is this a gradual rotation in and out during the stroke ?

Sorry if it's bleeding obvious , but some of us are relative beginners trying to keep up .
To clarify, if you use the / as depicting the rod, TRANSLATION is \ \ \ a horizontal movement of the hand/arm hence the rod, and ROTATION \ / an angular or rotational movement of the arm/hand that rod moves in a rotatory manner. Easier to show you than write it out ?
 
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