Training to Play

The reason I thought about it, is because a few of my regular students train with weighted flies most of the time. Which makes sense, but I think it’s also nice to bite them off too – more on that shortly.

As with any flycasting topic, we need to first consider ability level. For a beginner I would recommend not casting with weighted flies in practise until they are comfortable casting fluff. Otherwise you are potentially going to break your rod tip, or knock yourself unconscious, until you get the basics under control.

Casting weighted flies is different; indeed casting any fishing fly is different to casting fluff. When fishing, I will usually open my loops slightly, I won’t push my casting to the absolute limits and I will cast usually well within my abilities. In other words, I will hold back my performance slightly to avoid accidents, tangles, broken rod tips. Hitting the rod tip with a piece of casting wool, has totally different outcome, to hitting it with a heavily weighted crab fly.

So when I’m learning or teaching new movement patterns, I want the practise fly to be fluff. But as we know, that is very different to casting weighted flies. So we need to make that transition.  To do this take your favourite fly (preferably one that’s a bit mangled and looks like one of my flies) and with a pair of wire cutters, cut the hook at the end of the shank, just prior to the bend. I would cover it with a cloth when you do this and wear eye protection. If that thing is allowed to ping through the air it can cause an injury. And then, when training, also wear eye protection. Even fluff or mono can hurt your eye if it strikes; but a weighed fly, even a hookless one, will be very painful if you have an accident.

To begin I would first play with casting just the leader and fly — and no fly line. Get comfortable with this first. Notice the backcast must be aligned 180 degrees, both in tracking as well as trajectory to the front target. I always talk about ringing an imaginary backcast bell. Get very comfortable casting and swinging the weighted fly around with just the leader, notice how it hangs in the air... And then add a few feet of line and repeat.

This process I think very important: to build your cast from leader only outside the rod tip, to whatever your max comfortable carry is.

Now another important question is about tackle. Normally we recommend training with a line weight of between 5 & 7. And usually a WF or DT sometimes. A floating line that is visible. Nothing too weird in taper. But if you are going to take shots at permit with a 10WT line and a clear tip, you need to be practising with this too. A skills transfer needs to occur between your casting practise tackle and your Permit fishing tackle. And to do that it means you also have to train with the gear you are going to fish, training the same casts/shots. This will involve line management, accuracy, distance, planes, etc etc. specific to your fishing.

Some of us are very lucky and live on the water. Here I fish poppers 95% of the time. And while I do practise with poppers much of the time, I also really enjoy nothing better than casting a small piece of fluff on a 6WT. I think it’s a really good way of upping performance because then we are not casting within limitations, but instead trying to push boundaries. So both, for me, are important.

I remember after a week or two of fishing weighted nymphs in NZ, day after day, early season, just taking the damned flies off after dark and casting loops around was so much fun! There needs to be some sort of balance between fishing tackle, casting training tackle and then a few sessions to transfer skills across.

Hope you’re having a great day. Lots of lessons for me this week and I'm fishing in between!

Cheers, Paul