Rickard Gustafsson | Sunday, 1 December 2024
I’m checking my video library to remember the history of our work together. The beginning of our work is a bit of a haze; I remember what we did, but not really when. But I did my homework, reviewed the lessons, and took notes. I just remember when we had worked through the full curriculum, and Paul asked, “What’s next?”
What was next was focusing on competing. Give it a try at least. But that topic I intend to follow up on in future FPs.
I have some tips/ideas to share with those who do or intend to take lessons with Paul. Do the work, review the videos, and take notes. I increase the speed of the video when I review it. It helps me focus and reduces the time you need to spend on it.
Somewhere Paul has written that during a lesson, he adds things until he sees steam come out of the ears of the student. Not a totally bad description of the feeling of being a student also. But not in a bad way—he has a good sense of how much you can take in a session. And you have the video from the session, and you can ask Paul questions in between sessions.
Reviewing my video library, we blasted through the full curriculum in about six to seven months. That’s quite a lot of stuff in that time frame. We started with cleaning up my overhead stroke by working on accuracy and distance. That did bump me up one or two distance brackets quite fast. The brackets Paul and Nick have outlined in their video series about distance casting are damn good and accurate. Might not seem like it before you have reached them all, but everything is in there.
The cool thing is that you can feel when you have reached a new bracket. If I would rate how hard it is to rearch the top brackets I would say that 110'-115' is maybe not easy but possible. If I would hazard a guess, it is that everyone can reach the 110’-115’ bracket if they work through Paul’s curriculum and do the work. And if you do, you have done damn well!
The 120'+ bracket is different beast. Not impossible, but the jump to this bracket is quite huge.
My only idea about distance before starting to work with Paul was that it would be really cool to reach the backing knot on a regular fly line. So I got quite a lot more than I thought was possible.
After the initial cleanup of the overhead casting, we did all of the roll cast, water-anchored stuff. I think it was here things really started to improve. Paul quite often mentions Speys as an important point. Maybe that’s why I start to do Speys when I zone out during practice. And while we are on the topic, I think the jump roll is a very good cast to evaluate what’s the most efficient forward haul. Try one with the hauling hand starting at the reel and one where you haul from the shoulder.
From there, it was “just” the rest. Quite useful things. Like mends are useful even for a seatrout fisherman. At least on the Swedish west coast. From somewhere a bit south of Gothenburg up to Norway, everything is an archipelago with a lot of rocks. So quite a nifty skill to be able to throw mends around rocks. The backcast deliveries you must have for fishing for seatrout—the wind is, for some reason, always on the wrong shoulder. Speys and steeple casts are also a good idea to have, since the archipelago is full of walls of granite. Quick shots—the shots might not need to be quick, but it is a good skill to be able to get the line out with few false casts. Because there is a lot of casting since it is almost only blind fishing we do. The seatrout is called the fish of 10,000 casts.