Insidious Creep

Insidious Creep. Sounds like a sneaky little character from a Dickens novel doesn’t it?. He’s nasty little thief who steals something precious from you without you even realising it. In fact it often takes someone else to tell you that something has been stolen from you because you haven’t noticed anything is missing.

 Creep is a fault, I don’t care what anyone else says. It is an involuntary movement of the rod in the direction of the cast, ie, you have stopped the rod on the backcast and instead of staying in that position while the line straightens behind you move the rod hand forward and/or rotate the rod forward before the start of the stroke proper. What does that rob you of?, casting angle. You now have less of it than you thought you had and you will now throw a tailing loop (see the Essentials). If you throw tails consistently check to see if you are creeping.

 Creep has to be involuntary, if you do it conciously then it is not creep it’s drift and drift is not a fault. We will probably discuss drift in a future post.

 Creep in a beginner is a sort of anticipation of the next stroke and is fairly easy to correct because their stroke is not ingrained in their muscle memory yet. Creep in an experienced caster can be more difficult to correct because they have developed a technique to compensate for it that has become ingrained in their muscle memory and once something like that gets ingrained it can take a lot of effort on the casters part to work it out of their stroke.

 A lot of good casters don’t realise they are creeping. When it is pointed out to them they make a conscious effort to stop but as soon as they get back into a casting rhythm it comes back again. This is the time to add drift to the repertoire.