The
joys of casting
Though anglers commonly talk about casting a fly to a fish, the actual
artificial fly is a hindrance to casting and what you really cast is the
heavy fly line.
I find that quite irrespective of an angler’s casting skills the
majority of anglers have only a vague notion of how far they are actually
able to propel the fly towards the fish.
Some manufacturers or wholesalers of fly lines like to boast that it is
possible to cast their lines far enough to get the whole of a 30-yard
line out through the top ring on the rod. Don’t be fooled. Not one
in a thousand anglers can achieve this with a floating line, and if your
line is double taper rather than weight forward you are even less likely
to achieve your aim.
Remember that even when your actual fly line goes a long way you often
find that the fly itself has not straightened the leader so you may well
be some three yards short of your hoped for distance.
I cannot cast a fly anything like the distance that I could before old
age and arthritis overcame me, but even at my best I only achieved casts
of over 30 yards when I used a shooting head rather than a full line.
And that was in reasonable conditions of wind speed and direction.
The longest accurately measured distance from my feet to the fly that
I ever achieved was a little over 42 yards, and this was in ideal conditions,
casting on grass, and using a rod and shooting head line loaned to me
by a world champion fly caster.
The tournament casters technique that is called ‘double hauling’
is a necessary part of our actual fishing technique today, and in conjunction
with a properly designed shooting head line it does improve distance by
a big margin.
Most good casters use this technique, but a few anglers can get good distance
with full lines without double hauling.
They are in the genius class, and the finest exponent of this style is
Allan Purnell, the manager of the Ladybower fishery whose casting is a
joy to watch.
I sometimes used to try to encourage casting pupils to see how easy casting
really is when done properly by separating the top piece of the rod from
the handle part and casting with just four or five feet of the rod top.
I was brought down to earth one day when a friend (Richard Ward) went
one better than this and cast a fly line quite a long way with just the
line in his hands and no rod used at all!