Andy Dear | Monday, 17 April 2023
We cannot control the wind, but we can direct the sail.
---Dolly Parton
Years ago, while on the deck of Rob Fordyce's skiff, Rob, John Tebbetts and I got into a discussion about angling skills. While several high profile names made the conversation, I'll always remember what Rob said about Sandy Moret. "Sandy may not be the prettiest caster in the world, but somehow how he has a way of getting that fly EXACTLY where it needs to be at the right time". Ironically enough, almost twenty years later on a recent episode on The MillHouse Podcast, Captain Mark Krowka said the exact same thing about legendary Tournament angler, Captain Tim Mahaffy. If you haven't listened to the episode with Tim, it's certainly worth a listen. It is a deep dive into the minds of who my old pal John Tebbets called "by far the best Bonefish angler in the Florida Keys"
I have thought a lot about this over the years, and one of the conclusions that I have come to is that the ability to have CONTROL over the variables of the presentation is far more important than the execution of any one or two specific, and often purely aesthetic attributes of the cast. My position for almost two decades has been that rather than practicing and developing the ability to throw a "tight (sexy) loop", what we should be honing is our ability to have complete mastery over the size and shape of the loop itself. Andy's interview with Tim validates this, as he describes that he prefers a wider more open loop in many cases because it allows for a softer presentation of weighted flies. Honestly, I can't remember a time in recent history where I have practiced executing a wider loop! In several past Front Pages, I have written fairly extensively about the importance of being able to control distance and direction...I would now add loop size and shape as a proud equal to that list as well.
None of this matters however if we can't do these things under both the best and worst of conditions. I've read stories about how the legendary golfer Ben Hogan, who many say was the most intense practitioner of "practice" in the sport of golf, would be on the driving range under the worst meteorological conditions beating balls for hours on end. It obviously wasn't because he enjoyed it, but in his own words, he wanted to know what his swing was going to do when it was cold, when it was raining, when it was windy, when it was hot. He wanted to take as much unpredictability out of the equation as possible, by understanding and improving upon his limitations, and being able to perform the task at hand under as many different conditions as possible. And to quote Ben Hogan "The time for a golf lesson is not during the downswing". In other words, one has to work on these limitations while not engaged in the actual act of fishing, where total attention can be paid to the details of the process.
Hope you all are having a great week!
Andy