Serendipety

I have just got back from a BFCC meeting in Oswestry which I will write more about on the BFCC website. One of the people attending was Steve Parkes who makes AtomSix rods, and, of course, he brought along a rod or two for us to play with. The standout one for me was the #5 Tachyon, which I am sure is capable of making some seriously long casts but when I talked to Steve I told him I thought that if the bottom two sections could be beefed up slightly it would make a wonderful comp rod. Later in the day he put a rod in my hands and told me to try it and lo and behold I had a real cannon in my hands. I could only play with it for a few minutes but it had so much potential I didn’t want to put it down. The only other rod I have had like it was the original silver Hardy Angel TE. It was the only rod I have ever owed that you could keep asking more from and it would give it to you…until it broke….and broke again, and again. I feel the rod Steve handed to me has the same potential (not for breakage). These are not easy rods to cast, you have to work them out. Nearly all the #5 rods I use for distance have some limitation that you have to recognise and work within, it’s nice to get one where you can go beyond the normal boundaries. If Steve decides to market whatever it was he put in my hands I will buy one.

Having a beer with a rod builder is interesting experience. I learned more about rods and how they are designed, blanks made and built in an hour than I have in the previous ten years. Steve is an enthusiast, I normally steer well clear of enthusiasts they can be a bit of a pain in the arse (where is a smilie when you want one? It would be an ironic one) but an interesting enthusiast is a pleasure to be around…especially if he happens to build bloody nice rods.

Be Still, My Beating Heart

If someone asked you what defined fly casting to you what would your answer be? The fly? The symmetry of the back and fore cast? the line we have to use? For me it is the loop. I find the loop endlessly fascinating, not the least because I don’t understand the forces involved. The loop is dynamic, I feel it has life. Of course it hasn’t got life, it’s not sentient but it is the beating heart of a good fly cast.

Because fly lines tend to be mono coloured it’s difficult, if not impossible, to actually see what happens when we create a loop, all we see is the shape moving down the line. If you take the time and marker pen the line so you have black and white bands every four or five hundred millimeters you start to see a whole new universe open up before your eyes. You suddenly see the loop is actually a wave traveling  down the rod leg. You see the fly leg whizzing along, feeding into the loop and then just being part of the static rod leg (if you don’t shoot line). It becomes even more fascinating when you start messing around with presentation casts. Do some wiggles and the line actually appears to come back towards you. Snap casts can produce some vomit inducing optical confusion as the bands on one part of the line move in opposition to other parts of the line.

You can have fast loops, slow loops, wide loops, narrow loops, pointy loops, rounded loops, vertically orientated loops, horizontally orientated loops and upside down loops, there is even a photo somewhere on Sexyloops of Ben Spinks casting a square loop (God help me if I haven’t tried to create one of my own).

I sometimes look at a loop, especially one that is very slow, and wonder at it’s ability to turn the leader over. But it does, somehow. There is a loop shape we now call dolphin nosed because of the kink immediately behind it in the fly leg. As far as I can make out the loop is at near stall speed, it looks as if it should collapse, but it doesn’t, it just keeps rolling along and will even turn the leader over. When I first started to notice this loop shape I was preparing for my CCI and assumed it was a fault in my casting. I posed the question on Gordy Hills group and had a reply from Bruce Richards that if he saw one in a test he would regard it as the sign of a good caster. I now regard it as a sign that the caster has the ability to control the amount of force they apply to the line (ok, I know we apply force to the rod, but you know what I mean). It’s the amount of force we apply and the way we transfer that force to the line via the stop that creates the different loop shapes. High line speed, a hard stop and some counterflex will give you the classic top pointed ‘sexyloop’. A softer or dampened stop will give you a more rounded loop. Some rods, and even lines, are more inclined to throw one or the other naturally. There was a time, not so long ago, that if someone handed me their rod to have a cast with (for some reason I sometimes had to wrench it out of their hands first) the first thing I would do is strip all the line off the reel and either see how much line I could aerialize or see how far I could cast it, or both. These days I am more likely to see what loop shapes I can create first……..then try and blast the thing.

The Impressionist

It’s odd how something sticks in your brain and stays there when a lot of other stuff just goes in….and then goes straight back out again. I guess it’s to do with your character and the thing that stuck just reinforced a particular trait you may have. When taking a casting assessment we are exhorted to ‘make it look easy’, give the impression, at least, that we know what we are doing. I’m not sure where the line is drawn between the impression of confidence or the appearance of arrogance is though. Is standing there in no particular stance, chewing gum and one hand in your pocket while executing an over powered curve cast a sign of confidence or arrogance?

I admit to being an impressionist, I’m not into minute detail. You can tell that just by looking at any fly I tie. You can tell it’s a fly, you’re  just not quite be able to tell which one it’s meant to be. Thank goodness the fish don’t seem to mind. You could imagine a nice fish sidling up to one of my flies and wondering what the hell is that supposed to be? then calling his mate over ” Hey Basil, have you seen this?” ”By heck George, what is it?”  ”I don’t know Basil but I am getting the irresistable urge to eat it”. ”George, GEORGE, what’s up? Come back George”

Back to casting. To make it look easy you do actually have to be able to do the cast first and work on the nonchalance later. For instance, long before I became interested in becoming an instructor I was a distance freak. I had spent years trying to hit the horizon. One of the tasks in the test was a ‘distance’ cast to seventy-five feet. I was so used to balls out, gung-ho, blast the f***** out there style casting that I had all sorts of problems reining myself in to a ‘make it look easy’ style. I never worried too much if a distance cast tailed a bit, it would untail itself and still reach 120′. The result was what mattered not how it looked or a few knots in the leader. Suddenly I am faced with having to do a piddly little seventy-five feet cast that looks good as well. No tails, nice loop and parallel legs. It took me hours and hours to make it ‘look easy’.

It’s a strange thing but once you have passed the test all the casts, even the ones you may have struggled with, seem easy. I suppose the pressure is off, the element of fear has gone and you just relax and a relaxed caster is a better caster.

After a while you may look back and think to yourself that it was quite easy. You may even think the tasks should be more of a challenge. If  this was your first test then you may decide to challenge yourself to go to the next level. You pass and after a while you look back and think it should have been harder. I think this is natural, but, it is also wrong. I think Caesar used to have a slave riding in his chariot whose job was to keep reminding him he was just a mortal. Not a job to relish, I would imagine. Piss Caesar off once too often and you were likely to discover your own mortality quicker than you had hoped.

It may be a onerious job but it needs doing. That’s not to say you still don’t have to give a damn good impression that you know what you are doing though. You still have to deserve to be Caesar.

You Cannot Be Serious

Well, I can be sometimes. When I have something to say or someone winds me up I may put on my serious face, but generally I’m a bit more tongue in cheek than deeply meaningful. Now and again some good stuff slips out but it’s usually more by accident than design. I just write what I think and usually with nothing specific in mind other than the fact I feel the need to write, like now, for instance.

My life has focused around fly casting for about twelve years now. Before that I just used to go fishing and never bothered about the casting. Actually, thinking back, I have always enjoyed casting. There was a period where I was quite interested in beach casting. I even got to about 200yds in the field, which by todays standard is a mere flick because some of the top guys are hitting 300 metres plus. I have spent many a happy night on some bleak and freezing beach trying to untangle a birds nest on my multiplier. I refused to use a fixed spool on the grounds that they were the reel of choice of a ditter and not a serious minded sea angler, like wot I was. Idiot.

Of all the fishing I have done over the years I think I enjoyed coarse fishing the most. The early mornings with the sun just coming up and the mist rising off the water. The mini bubbles fizzing up around the lilies as the tench feed around the roots. All the usual romantic stuff. I only got into fly fishing in the first place because of the old close season. Fishing was an obsession in those days and to go a week, let alone three months, without going fishing was unbearable. Eventually I found the process of going fly fishing so much simpler than all the kerfuffle that surrounded going coarse fishing. Just grab the rod and waistcoat and go. No bait to buy or ground-bait to mix, no pinkies to sort out, no smell of sweaty maggots, no swarms of blue bottles flying around the van on hot days from all the escaped maggots. Just box of flies I had tied and some odds and ends and I was good to go.

I readily admit I am not even close to being a great angler. Generally the fishing was just an excuse be on my own. I have always needed me time and I have always enjoyed the slightly ethereal quality of being somewhere relatively remote on my own so fishing was perfect for me. I am not usually a joiner of clubs, those I have joined were only to access some water or other, never the social side. I have enjoyed the odd day fishing in company but generally I was alone and paid the consequences of being a loner by hardly ever fishing with someone better than me and thereby learning from them.

The sudden obsession with the art of fly casting took me by surprise. I had no intension of developing a near anal interest in it. To decide to learn to cast a five weight as far as is humanly possible is not really normal, is it? Couple that with my dwindling interest in fishing for the stock fish which is the vast majority of the easily reached fishing in the area I live and you have the recipe for the creation of another obsession. Fly casting can be solitary but then it really would be pointless. Just you a rod and a tape measure is the road to insanity. You, a rod, a tape measure and some like minded friends may be communal insanity but you do get to meet some interesting people.

Hang On!

Hang time. I have seen the expression and never really gave it much thought. To be honest I am not entirely sure exactly what it means. I take it to mean the length of time the line is in the air, after loop formation,  before it drops to the water, but I could be wrong. For the purposes of this post that is what I am going to assume it means.

Has anyone heard the theory that if a bullet is fired from a gun horizontally and you drop a bullet from the same height at the same time they will both hit the ground at the same time? Whats that got to do with fly casting you ask. Well, believe it or not its the same when casting a fly line. Ten feet or one hundred feet, if the line was cast horizontally the line takes exactly the same time to hit the ground. After extensive experimentation, I mean at least half an hour, casting various lengths of line as horizontally as it was possible for me to do, I conclude that horizontal hang time for a 6’2” man casting a 9′ rod is approximately three seconds. In essence this means the only difference between a 10′ cast and a 100′ cast is line speed. Of course this isn’t the entire story, we rarely cast horizontally for one thing. For short casts we cast below horizontal (so hang time will be less) and for long casts we cast above horizontal (so hang time will be more). The question is how much more? one second? two seconds? And, on real distance stuff, it doesn’t matter how high a trajectory you fire the line at there will nearly always be some sag in the belly of the line as its shooting that will hit the ground first. You have to remember the rod leg will start to be affected by gravity almost immediately, even if it is being shot. This is why you often see distance casters raise the rod tip as high as they can as line is being shot in an effort to keep the belly off the ground as long as possible, especially as the loop gets near the end of its travel. It will also make a difference what line you use. A long belly WF or a DT will tend to sag more, and therefore hit the ground earlier, than a mid to short bellied WF’s. The trade-off is that you have a lot more line aerealized with the long belly (perhaps nearly twice as much as you could with some short bellied WF’s) so the loop has a longer line to transmit itself along before it runs out of steam. Where as it is entirely possible, with some lines, the loop still has a lot of energy left at turnover but the dynamic ability of the loop to pull out running line is now lost and the whole thing collapses in a heap. This is especially prevalent with short shooting heads.

So, a distance cast is a balance between the loop having sufficient speed to pull out the running line (and hopefully some backing), having sufficient tension to keep the belly from sagging too much, have sufficient energy to get to turn over the leader and the right trajectory that is just high enough to do the job but not so high that the drag kills the cast. All this in a time-frame of five seconds, or less.

The Devil Rides Out

To Infinity and Beyond is the big picture, those are the basic things you need to master on your way to casting long. However, the devil is in the detail and that’s what this piece is about. The little things that when added together go to producing a near perfect cast. I say ‘near perfect’ because it is very difficult to get it 100% right, even the top guys may only get it right one in ten shots. I may be lucky to get it right one in a thousand, if that, but I would imagine I get close to 90% right most of the time and my 90% is around 120′ with a five weight.

Let’s start with stance. I use an open stance, that’s to say my left foot is in front of my right (I am right-handed). Now, I have seen some adopt this stance but still face towards where they are casting, ie, their feet point towards the target so the body is actually in a closed stance. Turn your feet to about 45 deg and you will find you can now track the rod in a straight line from pickup to stop. If your feet are pointing straight to target you will find that the hand moves in a curve around your shoulder on the way to the stop the stop, this curve can be accentuated by a bit of body rotation from the hips as well. What this does is throw the loop off to the side of the rod tip and open it up, especially if, as I often see, the rod tip goes right around the caster and it ends up on their off side. If we are casting with the breeze from behind this will present a wide area of line to the air and kill the back cast. Just what you don’t want, even in a slight breeze, or ever, come to that. Now go back to the exercises I gave you on Infinity and see if it is now easier to track the rod straight and pop a nice loop on the backcast.

Next up is the body. There are some big muscles in there so let’s use them. Start with slightly bent knees, this will create the willow rather than the oak. You will be able to move with the cast. You can put your weight on your front foot and transfer it to the back foot for the back cast and you can push off the back foot onto the front foot for your forward cast. It will allow you to bend forward for the pickup and sway back as you move towards the stop. I sway more than most, I suspect it started as a way of getting my body out of the way of my hand as it pulled through in a (hopefully) straight line. This has developed into my particular style so try to copy it if you like but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work for you, develop your own.       This body movement will add quite some length to your casting stroke, I have never measured how much it adds to my stroke length because it will vary depending on what I am doing but I suspect it is somewhere in the region of four or five feet when I am balls out going for distance, which would make my overall stroke length (hand movement from back to front) close to ten feet. If you, as some do, add a step in there as well, your stroke length will increase even more.

Some of you may prefer a closed stance, with the right foot in front if you are right-handed. I have dabbled with this because some of the best of the best use it. Be prepared to fall over now and then, I did. One benefit is tracking, closed stance can certainly straighten it up. Once I had the feel of straight tracking I switched back to open stance with better tracking because I wasn’t supple enough to make closed stance work for me. One way to help make it work is to ‘step’ during the stroke. You pick up from a closed stance, step back during the stroke into an open stance and step back into a closed stance during the forward stroke. Again, this doesn’t really work for me, it adds too many variables that can go wrong, but there again I don’t hit 130′ on a regular basis which one closed stance stepper I know does.

Boy, these little details add up to a lot of writing and we haven’t got to the arm, hand and rod yet. More to come.

To Infinity And Beyond

So, you want to cast a long way eh? Well, pin back your ears. I’m going to tell you how to cast anything from a three weight upwards to 100′. Lay off the macho crap and concentrate on technique. There, that was easy wasn’t it.

Of course there is a bit more to it than that, but not much.

Oh, your rod isn’t good enough. Bollox is the simple answer to that. There are very few, if any, modern rods five (or probably four) weights or over that won’t cast at least 100′. So, don’t blame the rod.

Lines are a different matter, you will need a long belly WF like the Mastery Expert Distance ( MED) or a Barrio GT140 or a good old DT. Something you can carry a bit of line with. There are a few short or mid length bellied lines you can carry some decent lengths of line with but on the whole they tend to hinge like mad and even if they dont hinge they don’t transfer a nice loop from running line to belly. If you just want to practice increasing carry then I would go for a cheap DT and as you get better, say 60′ plus, then perhaps drop the weight of the line by one weight. If you get to 75′ carry with a five DT on a five rod you are getting close to rod breaking territory, be warned.

Ok, you have a rod and line. The leader can be just seven or eight feet of fifteen pound line with a small wool tag tied on the end. Don’t wast money by using tapered leaders (yet) it gets expensive.

As an act of faith I am going to assume you can already cast a fly line. That’s to say you can cast reasonable loops to a reasonable distance and that you can double haul.

As you stand there, rod in hand, and looking down the tape you have laid out, a red mist will descend and the macho streak kicks in. Well, kick it out again, think clever.

The shortest route between A and B is a straight line so the 180 rule is important. Walk down the tape a few feet, turn around and eye up a distant target directly inline with the tape. That’s you’re aiming point for your back cast, don’t lose it.

Next; yes I know you can carry 70′  but go back to fifty. Just do a smooth lift and crisp stop with just enough effort to get a nice turn over  and hit the forward cast just as the loop straightens, and lay it back down. Nope, less effort than that, nope, even less. You should notice that the less effort you put in the better the loops will get. Ah, that’s better, nice one. Now keep doing that for a day or two. This is about building muscle memory so don’t rush it. While you are doing this try different stances and grips. Do it with your eyes closed and feeel what you are doing. Are you planted like an oak tree or bending like a willow, think willow. Now try a couple of casting cycles, always working on good loops and minimum effort. At this point Bill Gammel will tell you to increase your line length by one foot and repeat it all. Sorry Bill, life is too short. I say three feet. You should now have a decent grasp on what is happening so your repetitions can get shorter and your plus three feets can be come a bit faster. However there will come a point where it all goes tits up, the red mist descends and macho man is getting desperate to escape. This is the moment to drop back two or three phases and get a grip on yourself. Kick Macho into touch, he is only trying to hurt you. Oh, and while we are talking pain, if you feel any, STOP. If you get shoulder, elbow or wrist pains pack it in and let whatever you have done recover. I have ignored these warnings in the past and had to lay off casting for months. It ain’t worth it believe me.

I will allow you a five or ten minute session at the end of practice to just have a blast and see if you are progressing.

The funny (not) thing is that once you can hit 100′ consistently it becomes a ridiculously easy cast to make.

Let me know how you get on.

Nervous Twitch

I decided I had enough of prating around at thirty to fifty feet and decided to open up and have session with the #5 TCR, just for the hell of it. I discovered I have developed a very vertical style, which is a good thing. I guess all that prating around at thirty to fifty feet had an overall effect on my general style. Why vertical? One of the requests from the CBOGs, who oversee testing, is that we cast a more upright style during our assessment. It makes it easier for them to assess loop width and tracking, among other things. I originally jibbed a bit at that because it smacks of imposing a style, which I am dead against, but on reflection I could see their point so I went with it. 

Ok, so why is vertical a good thing for distance? It’s the line of least resistance. It’s the epitome of the 180 rule. It reduces the risk of the arm tracking around the casting shoulder and the torso rotating at the hip, which would have a similar effect.

I used to think that a more side on stroke was more powerful. It certainly felt as if you could get your shoulder behind the rod and really give it some welly. However it topped out at under 120′ so it had to go. The problem was it was hard to get rid of, months, if not years, of side swiping had created a muscle memory problem. I would start off a session nice and vertical but as I concentrated on other things the rod would end up canted over. It was still happening late last summer when I last did some concentrated distance practice. So, you can imagine how delighted I was to discover I was naturally casting a more vertical distance style without having to think about it. Long may it last. I hit another 130′ as well as a lot of mid to high 120’s which sort of vindicates the more vertical approach.

I have been wondering what type of twitch I have, no I don’t mean the nervous twitch I develop every time I think about the Masters test, I mean the muscular fast or slow type that we all fall into. Have a read here http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/anatomyandphysiology/a/MuscleFiberType.htm . Interesting eh? I have been considering if there are (and there must be) some fast twitch instructors who have a naturally fast stroke. I’m sure I have been taught by one or two and been bemused by the blur of action as the rod moves like Zorro on the attack. ‘Did you see what I did there?’ , well, no actually. Swish swish swish. ‘See that?’ Erm…no, can we go a bit slower please.

I suspect I have a medium to slow twitch, I know my casting cadence is slower (or feels it) than most people I cast with.

Style

Style is my, or your, personal way of doing something. To achieve that something we may often have to perform certain tasks. It’s how we choose to perform these tasks that is our personal style. There will be obvious similarities but there will be many differences as well. Now, If I am teaching you how to perform a particular task I would show you the way I perform it first and as you got better at it I may make suggestions that may help you to perform it better, I may even suggest one or two alternatives and allow you to decide which one suits you best, one that suits your developing style. That’s the point, style developes over time. Let’s get specific.

 We want to cast a fly line. The manual tells us we need to perform five essential things, it doesn’t tell us which foot should be in front of the other, how to specifically grip the rod or what path the hand should travel. Consensus dictates that there are some ways that are better than others. I will suggest it’s better to grip the rod more like a screwdriver than a hammer. I might suggest that, just for now, an index finger pointing up the rod might help with that wrist breaking problem on the back cast. I will give you another couple of alternatives once we have sorted that out. I will point out that that square on stance you have automatically adopted may not necessarily be the best and that by placing one foot slightly ahead of the other you are better balanced and you also won’t be so static. Which foot? Ah, well, that depends. As we are only casting a short line, no, 30′ isn’t a distance cast, sorry, I think right foot forward might be best, we call this a closed stance. Think darts. When we want to cast a bit further you might try left foot forward, we call that an open stance, think javelin. I doesn’t matter too much for now though, just feel comfortable.

 You get the picture. I don’t teach style I teach substance, with a few stylistic suggestions thrown in. What I won’t be doing is insist you stand like this, hold the rod like that and move your hand from here to there. If you come to me an already a fairly accomplished caster I am not going to try to alter your style, I will just try to smooth out any faults and suggest a few things you might find work, for you.

 One of the things that, retrospectively,  appeals about the FFF is their style free ethos. So much so that I would resent having a style imposed on me for a specific purpose. You want me to put the fly there and the line there and there, no problem, well maybe, but if I do it and can explain how and why I did it the way I did it I am buggered if I will accept  being criticised because I didn’t hold the rod with my pinky standing out and I wasn’t standing in the ‘proper’ stance.

 Of course, my viewpoint may be different from most. I spent a large proportion of the last ten years trying to figure out a way of blasting a fly line out to the horizon. This involved a lot of trial and error plus watching and picking the brains of some of the best casters in the world. It also involved some radical re thinks and several re builds, not something the average fly-fisher expects to have to do. I did it my way……with a bit of his……and his, oh and don’t forget him or him……..

Yeah, I got style, I just wish I knew what it was.

Hog Heaven

That went well, thank goodness. My only real experience of a group of dedicated fly casting instructors is the annual Sexyloops get together and at those I have always been impressed by the free flow of information. Imagine my growing pleasure at finding the same enthusiasm at the GAIA meeting in Caer Beris last weekend. Hog Heaven.

 I am glad I made the effort to get up at 3am to drive over 250 miles. It meant I was there in time for a cup of coffee before I could enjoy the  workshop given by Leslie Holmes and Mark Roberts on presentation casts. Just the tips I learned in that workshop alone made the trip worth while.

 My workshop on distance casting seemed to be well received. I was in a bit of a quandary as to how I should present it but luckily I was sensible enough to have made a few notes to refer to when things got a bit sticky. I didn’t need to refer to them very often but I’m glad I made them. Once the introduction was over I worked my way through the cast and things fell naturally into place. And, actually, this was the most important lesson I learned over the weekend. Know your subject. I had no problem talking and demoing distance for an hour and a half. I could not have done  Leslie and Marks workshops on presentation or the one Phil Maher did on the Five Essentials with anything like the authority they did.

 I have bemoaned the fact that I do not have a FFF MCI who is easily available to me as I prepare to take my Masters. There were five of the buggers at Caer Beris. Each and every one offered to help me in my preparation. They may regret the offer.

 If this had happened in a FFF environment it would have re enforced my opinion that all FFF instructors are nice guys, however, it happened in a GAIA environment so it must be that all casting instructors are nice guys. Out of the sixty instructors attending I didn’t see one example of ego. Everyone was free with their time and ready with an answer if asked a question.

 I can only speak as I saw, and what I saw only impressed me.

 I recently read that to really be good at something you need to put in about 10000 hours of practice. I have done a rough calculation and I have worked out I am about 2000 hours short of the mark. Those two thousand hours become apparent when I look at the gap between me and the true masters whose company I had the pleasure of being in over the weekend. The gap will need to be narrowed considerably between now and next May. My original intention was to take the assessment with the expectation that I would fail it but gain valuable experience for the next time. I just might revise that.

 Thankyou GAIA for the invitation and your hospitality. And a special thanks to those that were so free with their time and encouragement.