Bernd Ziesche | Wednesday, 18 March 2015
Teaching fly casting is as much of a skill as is fly casting itself. Maybe the most important part of teaching is to identify all casting faults, which the students bring into the lessons. At the same time this probably is the most difficult part of teaching for most fly casting instructors. Fair to say it needs a lot of teaching-practice and knowledge about the details of fly casting.
Here I share a list of 20 common casting issues I come across in most of my lessons:
1. Starting (and/or finishing) the cast with too much slack line on the water.
2. Starting (and/or finishing) the cast with the rod tip too high above the water.
3. Waiting too long or too short before starting the next cast (mismatching timing).
4. Inappropriate force application during acceleration:
A) A too sudden burst of force application within the casting stroke. Often done via a too floppy and/ or over used wrist.
B) Last cast syndrome: Applying an unnecessary extra force within the delivery cast mostly resulting in A).
C) Starting the cast too slow within the first third of casting stroke.
D) Applying an unnecessary (high) level of overall force.
5. Early (mostly slow) rotating the rod forward during unrolling reducing the available arc for the next cast too much and thus supporting:
A) A too sudden burst of force application within the next casting stroke and/ or
B) A too low forward stop.
6. Inappropriate force application during deceleration:
A) A too abrupt or
B) A too soft stop.
7. Inappropriate positioning of the rod-rotation within the casting stroke:
A) Rotating too early when aiming for a tight loop or
B) Rotating too early when lifting the line of the water (ripping the line of).
8. Mismatching the size of the casting arc to the desired line speed. Mostly using an unnecessary wide arc supporting a too wide loop.
9. Mismatching the positioning of the casting arc to the desired trajectory.
10. Moving the rod too far out of one (and one only) rod-plane during acceleration and/ or deceleration:
A) Caused by too much (upper) body rotation and/ or
B) Caused by turning the wrist too much in or out.
11. Allowing the direction of the unrolled fly line deviating too far away from tip path for the next cast.
12. Too much false casting trying to fix problems without knowing the cause(s) exactly.
When double hauling:
13. Allowing the line to slip thru the guides while still accelerating the rod tip. Mostly done by opening the line hand too early.
14. Starting the line hand pull too early.
15. Inappropriate moving the rod hand forward while moving the line hand backward during unrolling. Mostly reducing the available arc for the next cast too much and thus supporting:
A) A too sudden burst of force application within the next casting stroke and/ or
B) A too low forward stop.
16. Line hand path deviating too far away of rod axis and thus creating an unnecessary high friction within the first guide.
17. Mismatching the distance of line hand pull to the desired line speed.
18. Slack line between the first guide and the line hand. Often caused by moving the line hand to fast up.
19. Using too much shoulder rotation and too little elbow rotation when creating additional line speed via line hand pull.
20. A too sudden burst of force application via line hand pull.
Of course there are a lot more fly casting errors that may enter ones casting. And many of the fly casting faults listened above can have many different causes - too much to list them all within one front page.
Watching fly casting instructors demonstrating the cause(s) of tailing loops I often see them trying to demonstrate one (and one only at a time) cause resulting in a tailing loop. In truth 95% of all students create tailing loops by adding several of the above fly casting faults to their casting. That makes it hard to identify the single causes!
Of course the better the instructor knows what to look for, the easier it is to identify (and classify) all casting faults.
If you are missing a common casting issue within my list, I’d be happy to read about it on the board!
All my best
Bernd
Just back from teaching: