Dealing with a crosswind (wrong shoulder) [Versión en español]
Karen is left-handed and ambidextrous. When she encounters a wind that threatens to send a low cast into her, she can simply cast with the other hand. This is the ideal situation. It took me a very long time to learn how to cast with my other hand. It takes dedicated practice. Casting simultaneaously with two identical rods is a nice way of learning to do this incidentally.
Anyway Steve is right-handed. I don't think he is ambidextrous, although I'm sure he could learn if he put his mind to it. In the meantime I'm going to introduce another simpler way of overcoming an awkward crosswind.
Simply by taking the tip of the rod over to the other shoulder we can send the line safely off to the other side.
There are two ways of doing this:
What I consider to be the American way: Tilt the hand, and nothing else, and cast as per normal. This makes hauling easier (something for a later lesson) but doesn't do it for me (I like to rotate the elbow when casting and I can't do this when using this technique).
The other method is to take the hand up to the other ear. When doing this, it is good practice to keep the back of the hand on top of the rod. This seems to both make the cast easier and give you a higher backcast.
I was taught to use the second method, incidentally, and one of the 'drills' I had to practise was to cast right ear, forehead, left ear. The idea being with the forehead bit, is that if you were to take the rod too far backwards, you would hit your head and that would remind you to stop sooner.
Pretty subtle I'm sure you'll agree.
