The Oswegatchie Swap

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In bait or spin casting, the principles of what you need to do are self-evident. You're casting a heavy concentrated weight with a flexible lever, your rod. You bring the weighted object up close to the tip of the rod before each cast, you haul it back over your shoulder as far as you need to for the cast you're about to make, and then you fling it, stopping the rod short on the forward stroke so that the rod catapults the lure or bait. The longer the cast you want to make, the farther back you bring the rod, and the higher you aim when you bring it forward and stop it for the final fling.

But now imagine you're holding a skinny nine-foot fly rod. At the end of your line you've tied on a little cluster of hair and feathers that's about the size of your fingertip. It weighs practically nothing. Where is the weight concentrated so that you can cast this weightless object at least 30 or 40 feet? Yup, in the line.

In fly-fishing, you cast the line not the lure. But the other principles that I've described are much the same, i.e., the farther you want to cast, the farther back you bring your rod and the higher you aim when you bring it forward and stop it. The main difference is that with a fly rod you'll often be casting 40 feet of line or more on both strokes, forward and back. You've got to time your stroke appropriately, allowing the line to move and to straighten out, behind you as well as in front of you, each time you cast. In order to accomplish this, you need to move your rod tip in practically a straight line toward and away from your target. If you move it in a deep arc, as you do in bait casting, you'll end up throwing your line inaccurately downward into the water behind you and in front of you.

These principles, as simple as they sound, were until recently looked upon as a practically heretical method of explaining or teaching fly-casting. Even at the beginning of this decade, fly casting was most often taught according to the traditions of the previous century and took practically no account of the developments in rod materials and line design. People were routinely told to practice the casting stroke as if they were standing in front of a clock face. The rod, we were told, should only move between the positions of 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock, and it should move in a rigid and regular beat. This was the original English tradition, and it was the foundation of most modern casting techniques...

Until two fellows, Bernard "Lefty" Kreh and Ed Jawarowski, came along to wreck the rigid mythology. I can highly recommend them as the best sources available for learning both your basic stroke and more advanced casts. Their style of casting and teaching casting is natural, understandable, relaxed, and completely adapted to the graphite rods of today. Ed's well-illustrated book, The Cast, is arguably the best available guide to fly casting. I only wish it was around some 25 years ago when I took my first stabs at fly-fishing. It would have saved me years of frustration.

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