Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 8 November 2025
I have an idea where most of our fly casts fail. From beginner level to highest level of casting. Of course it will be much less common at the highest level, but I still see this problem there also. We could argue that it happens at the delivery, that this is where most casts fail. And yes this is where we will see a lot of failures. Some failures are just pure failure of the delivery. The beginner that has done a lot of spinn fishing will do a janky spinn cast delivery and everything fails. Someone going for a long casts and adding too much power at the delivery.
Now picture this. A fly fisher standing by the water fishing the fly in. Rod tip to the sky, not giving the poor dog a drink, the line hanging down in the water like a hammock. The line is lifted in a long wide arch and the fisherman is starting to flop the line around. The fly comes flying around everywhere and our poor fisherman wants to get out of the way of the fly, so the arm is extended and suddenly the rod is waved around with a fully extended arm and the fly is still just getting closer. I think most of us have seen this, and probably been the person holding the rod. The slack introduced at the start of the casts doesn’t go away, it follows the caster through the whole casting cycle and doesn’t go away.
The next picture I want to give you is this. You are watching a heat at the world championships of fly casting, the event is trout distance. You see one of the casters going back and forth, the line isn’t fully straightening on either the back cast or the forward cast. The caster goes for the delivery and it is a mess, the caster looks a bit defeated and not understanding of what went wrong. A cast like this can sometimes be solved by adding a lot of speed to the line but it is very rare to end up with a really good cast from this. Just drop it and start over. It will not hookup!
So what went wrong here? A shitty pick up. If the pickup is bad the rest of the cast will suffer. You will be chasing a problem that will propagate through out the cast. Sometimes it can be resolved but it is hard to remove the shitty pickup from the cast. So don’t do shitty pickups! Practice the pickup. If you are going for the CI exam spend a lot of time perfecting the pickup on grass. And don’t forget the water. Practice every pickup you will be expecting to be doing and it should be sharp.
Look at other sports, they are very careful with the start. They know this are where things fail first. And it is true, thing will fail at the first chance they get to fail.
An extra note here on teaching the pickup. If you are an instructor and your idea of teaching your students the pickup is like this, “End by giving the students their Assignment: Now pull out enough line to make a 35’ cast and make 20 Pick-up and Lay Down casts”, I wish you sloppy pickups for the rest of your life! Or until you stop torturing your students like this. Sidearm and short line is the key for learning, at all levels but especially for a beginner.
This is a fun game for practising and measuring your pickup game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHEVhYtvxA
I can tell you that the one going to win this game is the caster with the best pickup.
If you really want to see the importance of a good pickup learn the snakehead shot. Here all the aspects of a perfect overhead cast comes into play. You are not getting away with any errors here.
And a little bonus drill for the pickup. Do a snap cast pickup, lift the rod tip to various positions and snap the line up. I think you will find some interesting things here.
Cheers, Rickard
PoD: A reminder of you know what, you will need it for your pickups.