Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 15 March 2025
The reaction from some people when they are shown the 170 back cast is that it is a sure fire method to blow out the elbow. It looks like the rest of the distance casting stuff, lot of power and effort. When a good distance cast is about efficiency. Do all the essential stuff better and cast further.
The 170 back cast should, and can, be effortless. It shouldn’t be about forcing anything. Ok, there might be some effort when going for 130+ feet with a 5wt line. But not in the blow your elbow out territory. For most casting it should just feel like letting your elbow fall over. I really learnt that recently. And that with a quite easy drill I recently found by misstake
Recently I have been working on making my regular closed stance stroke more efficient and better my roll cast. I want things to be smooth and deliberate. Not forcing any part of the stroke. One thing I have been doing while working on this is to up line my rod. A rod that is stiff relatively to the line weight can let you get away with errors in your casting. I think that is one reason why many casters prefer very stiff rods for distance competitions. It masks some errors in the casting. It won’t let you cast the furthest distance just because of that but lets them chuck a long cast once in a while. To cast the longest and long consistently a combination of technique and equipment is a requirement.
So one day last week when I was out casting I had my HT5 stringed up with a MED7. I was doing some short line loops and decided to peel off a bit more line and cast a little longer. And then decided to go full 170. It is not a setup to force a long carry. But this setup gave me a really good feel of how effortless the 170 back cast can be. And have to be with this setup. Now I could really feel that the back cast was just letting the arm fall over from the 90 degree position. I did a few rounds of carry like this and switched line to the MED5. I could keep the same feeling for the back cast with the lighter line as well. But my back cast was better.
There you have it. A really simple drill to better the 170 back cast.
And the wait for the seatrouts? It is painful. We had the spring here for a brief and wonderful visit. Now we have snow.
Cheers, Rickard