Paul Arden | Tuesday, 17 May 2022
It’s great, having our good friends from Finland, Mika and Satu, over for a couple of weeks with us here in Malaysia. So far, at the time of writing this, no fish have been caught!! Satu has been close; she had one Snakehead eat and two other Snakehead chases. Tomorrow (today, when this goes live!) I certainly hope that Mika will have landed a fish because that will just make life very much easier for him. If Mika catches just one decent-sized Snakehead for the week, then that is the achievement we are hunting and I will be over the moon. If he can catch one tomorrow then maybe he will stick a few more as well!!
When I’m positioning the boat for a guest, then it all comes down to casting on their part. Being able to put the fly on a dinner plate, first go, without false casting, here gets the eat 90% of the time. The shot *absolutely* must go in. That’s all there is to it. And it should go in first time, and preferably first opportunity. Occasionally, you get another opportunity, but your 90% eat window goes down substantially the longer it takes to put the fly in.
We all mistakenly think that we are more accurate than we really are when fishing, because we usually wade to put the fish to a certain comfort distance, we false cast and often take multiple attempts to get the drift (read accuracy) that we want. That doesn’t happen here!! A dinner plate is optimal. A meter diameter is still in the game but not it’s not the 90%ers you are getting when you put it wide; instead these fish chase and of those maybe only 30% eat. This all to me, sounds very much like casting skills. The shot absolutely must happen!
Right now, there might be three genuine money-shot opportunities in a day. Can be more, but often not. If you are getting only three “put it in, make it happen” opportunities in a day, then you want to be putting them all in! That takes training. In fact if you are getting ten opportunities, which is about the very best you will ever get here, then you really want to be putting in 8 or 9 shots at least, bang on, first time around. That’s where I am; I don’t put in every shot but I put in 80-90% first time around and I’m very very pissed off if I don’t. (Mika will testify to this because one Gourami was given a very strong talking to when it spooked this morning!!).
I’ve trained very hard to do this — and there are still many days here when I go fish-less, despite putting the shots in. So I truly know how very difficult it is here. But I also know that the difference between a fishy day and no-fishy day is mostly down to me and the (my or the guest’s) ability to make the shot happen.
The best training I can suggest is three-fold. First is the Accuracy game as in the World Championships. This teaches a repeatable casting stroke and also with the ability to gauge distance first time. I cannot over-stress the significance of this game/training. If I had to do just one training then this would be it.
https://www.icsf-castingsport.com/uploads/Flycasting_Competitionrules.pdf
Second is the Snakehead Shot with the slipped lift. This needs to be second nature, otherwise in all probability no fish at all will see your fly here. None!! If you are having to be conscious of slipping line then you won’t catch fish under pressure because it needs to happen subconsciously. And believe me, watching a Snakehead rise, after spending hours hunting for the opportunity, is a very high pressure shot indeed! When you have to make the shot you have to make the shot. There is no time to be thinking about how to do it.
Thirdly — and this might surprise you — is to work on distance casting. Learning really good distance casting technique teaches you excellent all-round casting technique. It doesn’t teach you how to fly fish, but it certainly teaches you how to cast. That’s the one that’s made me a half decent caster.
So that’s all long-term training. Accuracy and Distance are two of the cornerstones to flycasting. The other two being Speys and Presentation Casts.
Can it happen here, this time around, for Mika and Satu, you ask the million dollar question? Yes I think it can and I certainly hope that it does! But it won’t be easy, hell it’s never easy here. If you are not putting in your shots, first time, then it’s going to be very very difficult indeed. The fish has to see the fly! So there is a big variable in here which is all about putting the shot in.
Now that Mika has decided to spend an extra week here, instead of going to Taman Negara to chase Ikan Kelah, my money now is on a daring and no doubt legendary success story!!! So yes I believe they will :)))
I’m looking forward to Mika’s page to read his thoughts. No doubt they will be exactly the same as mine :))))
Cheers, Paul