The Joy Of Practice

The Joy Of Practice

Andy Dear | Monday, 24 April 2023

I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the front yard on the casting course practicing accuracy and shooting some footage for an upcoming YouTube video. This morning I awoke to rain and sub 45f temperatures. It feels a bit silly to have a fire in the fireplace with the month of May just a week away, but here we are! So, I sat down next to the fire with a cup of coffee and spent the morning watching Paul's conversation with Nick Moore.

  My interest in distance casting has been sort of a love-hate relationship over the years. Much like those who take up golf, in the beginning I wanted to be able to hit the long ball. But, as I grew in the sport, I became much more infatuated with accuracy. And not just the physical movements that make a cast accurate, but also how the brain perceives and estimates things like distance and direction. I do occasionally go through periods where I will play with distance, but for the most part, whatever long casts I can execute have been more of a by-product of honing my technique through accuracy practice.

  Recently though I have begun to play with the 170 stopless technique, and have seen good results. So this morning when the weather turned south, I fired up the coffee maker and tuned into the 2 part conversation between Paul, and fellow Front Page writer Nick Moore. As one would expect, there is some fascinating technical talk between these two. The discussion toward the end about reaching the threshold of what's humanly possible with distance casting was particularly interesting to me. I had a VERY similar conversation with Press Poweel from Powell Fly Rods way back in 2004 regarding rod construction and materials. Press's position was that we had pushed the limits with currently available materials as far as they could go without compromising other equally important aspects of a fishing rod.

  The most enjoyable part of the conversation for me though was hearing these two talk about the joy they derive from practice. I can completely relate, for I have spent thousands of hours on various soccer fields, football fields, and just about any other public open area I could that was big enough to unroll a loop in. And yes, Like Nick, I too have had the odd heckler who thinks they are being cute by asking if I am catching anything! I will say that fly casting is by far not the oddest thing I have seen done on a publically owned green space. I have seen folks throwing boomerangs, I have seen metal detectorists looking for buried valuables, and a close personal friend of mine used to regularly ride his "offroad unicycle" on that same field...and yeah you read that right OFFROAD UNICYCLE.

  Probably the most unique experience I have had while practicing fly casting occurred somewhere around 2002. I stopped by the local park on my way home from work to have a quick cast before it got dark. Shortly after I began, off the edge of the field, I heard the sound of bagpipes. I guess someone decided to take up the bagpipes and his spuse wasnt too happy about it. So he hit the local park to put on a concert! Let me say in advance that I am a HUGE fan of the instrument, so this to me was about as good as it got... fly casting to the lovely drone of bagpipes, it somehow just seemed...totally appropriate!

  So thanks guys for the great conversation, and more importantly for the trip down memory lane. The times I spent on the practice field were the catalyst that allowed me to make some of the best memories of my life on the water. And as odd as it may sound, I look forward to the next thousand hours of as Ben Hogan used to say "digging it out of the dirt".

Hope you all are having a great week!

Andy