After coming back from Tassie late last year I started a thread on the Fly Casting Lab facebook page. I am re-posting here for those who don’t do facebook and because I think it’s worth thinking about in your own casting and certainly as a casting teacher. Yes, I know, I’ve probably gone on about this enough already but still……

“I’m recently returned from a 6 week trip to Tasmania. Watching fly fishers cast I was again struck by the two very common and related problems of over rotation and over powering. In fact I’d say that a clear majority of anglers had these problems. Raises a couple of issues to put out for discussion.

1. Why is this so common?
2. What are most effective teaching interventions?

I’ve thought a lot about this and keep coming back to several things which apparently are not widely understood in casting circles – by students or teachers for that matter. FWIW here is my take.

Over powering is another way of saying “excess effort”. Put succinctly, humans are naturally inclined to use more effort to try to compensate for Inefficient movement. In this there is a gender bias towards males who have “learned” to hit/kick/throw harder to go make things go further and faster. As we know in fly casting this creates a vicious circle. That is the caveman’s lot.

What we don’t often sufficiently appreciate is the effect of vastly increasing the length of our arms by using a long (third class) lever. I once roughly measured the comparative movement of my rod hand with my rod tip.  Rod tip distance moved was about 7 times my hand movement. This amplification means my margin for rod hand error is extremely small. The faster I move (more effort expended) the more I compromise accurate control of my rod hand movement. 

Fly casting then is technically a throwing movement but thinking about it like that, implicitly or explicitly, creates grave and even extreme risk of poor control because it is actually very different from throwing other things like stones or balls in cricket or baseball. Fly casting is an “unnatural” throwing movement due to the amplification factor.

Over rotation, the windscreen wiper effect, is similarly a result of being in too much of a hurry to get past translation and into rotation which we instinctively understand to be where the real action of propulsion goes down. Hence the relationship with over powering – too much haste means too much effort and thus increased exposure to the risk of inefficiency.

Teaching interventions. As others have already said it helps to demonstrate how little effort is actually required to turnover a fly line. I would add that it helps even more to enable the caster to watch what they doing as they do it and for this Lee Cummins triangle method is pretty hard to beat. I don’t teach often but I am resolved to buy a ball launcher when I get another student to teach in person. People use ball launchers to increase the distance they can throw balls for dogs to chase and quite soon they realise that it is different from a normal throwing action. They have to slow down to take advantage of the launcher.

The only way I can think of to reduce the negative impacts of instinctive (natural) movement is to practice relentlessly and mindfully until the unnatural, vastly amplified, movement of the rod tip becomes more normal. Two big hurdles there for the average caster, getting lessons and doing a lot of practice. Neither of these are common. The third large impediment to improvement is the extent of misinformation about fly casting, not least the bunkum and about rod loading. Idealising the casting of heroic distances doesn’t help much either. Further means harder right? :^)”