Casting …..by Lori-Ann Murphy
Drift away!
The other day in my casting and fishing I became acutely aware that I was rushing my cast. This becomes evident when you don’t see what you want to on the delivery side of things. And this usually happens when we haven’t been fishing enough. We want to see a nice tapered leader turnover a balanced tippet holding the fly. Creep. That’s the word. We tend to “creep” our forward cast in anticipation of getting our fly to the fish. I imagine those of you float fishing to hatches with feeding trout might recognize the situation.

Al Kyte was a very important teacher in my fly fishing. Al was a basketball coach at UC Berkeley and also keen on fly fishing – especially understanding the cast. He studied Steve Rajeff and Lefty Krey. He came up with that on their short cast they had the same casting style. Which was very interesting because grown ups were having big fights over casting style as FFF now FFI found its way. In any case, Al taught me about “drift.”

“Just think about your rod tip moving back just an inch after your stop.” Moving the rod tip back as the fly line unfolds behind you after your stop is the exact opposite of creep. If we move our rod forward just a fraction of an inch sometime too soon – ugly cast. So go ahead and practice drifting with dry flies at first. Make sure you keep your tip in the same plane – don’t let it drop. Time slows down in this move. If you are hauling line – let that line fly behind you and then grab the line up by the first guide and pull hard with your line hand and keep your rod hand nice and relaxed with a proper grip to your snappy stop. When you are ready, move on to streamers and look out. By the time fall hits you’ll be deadly.