Paul Arden | Monday, 2 March 2020
I attended a fly fishing festival last weekend in Terengganu. There were approximately 100 fly fishing participants - which I think is an excellent number! They mostly fish for a small river fish called Sikang, it has a few trout-like spots on its cheeks; it doesn’t appear to grow very large, but does eat dry flies and nymphs. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be around in huge numbers - certainly if the catch rate is anything to go by!
Anyway - I gave a presentation on the Essential Level Challenge because for those interested in improving their casting skills I firmly believe that this is the best way top go about it. In other words train so that you can do each cast 9 times out of 10 (in the certification you actually only need to manage it one in three!), and you will be a better “fishing” caster - this I can guarantee!
The following day I was casting with one of the attendees, Teng Wei, a nice chap who had asked me to have a look at his cast - and fairy typically for someone self-taught, he used semi open-stance, even for short casts, a tilted casting plane and had a significant tracking error. So I closed the stance, got the loop travelling over the top of the rod, put an imaginary target in the air behind him and shifted the bulk of the force application towards the end of the stroke for longer casts. Now he has nice “foundation” accuracy casting stroke and a very respectable fishing distance cast.
Of course “what a brilliant instructor!!” you are thinking, but not really, it’s just standard stuff, which incidentally Wei picked up extremely quickly - why did he pick it up so quickly? He’s an archery coach and one of the top ten archers in Malaysia!
While talking to Wei about competition in archery and fly casting, I had the idea that with a few modifications, we can turn the entire Sexyloops Essential Level Challenge into a competition. It’s possible to even have several levels, simply by modifying the hoop size, or we can even replace the single 2m hoop with a World Championships Accuracy hoop… And so, assuming that the Sexyloops Meet is not affected by Coronavirus, then we will definitely have one of these competitions there - this will be fun! The hardest cast will be the overpowered curve casts, because these will now be into a target.
Ben Foo kindly filmed me teaching the challenge; I’ll have a look through the footage today. I’m hoping to be able to upload it with some edits in order to describe the challenge better. Even just the first task appears to be quite difficult for some!
You can read more about this challenge here;
https://www.sexyloops.com/index.php/ps/the-essential-level-challenge
The PDF document is here;
http://www.sexyloops.com/flycast/challenge/SEXYLOOPS_ESSENTIAL_LEVEL.pdf
A small discussion on the Board, where I would be interested to hear your thoughts;
https://www.sexyloops.co.uk/theboard/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3203
Talking of which, there is an excellent discussion on Curve Casts here;
https://www.sexyloops.co.uk/theboard/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3190
Have a great week!
Cheers, Paul