The Art of the Cast

Fly casting tends to be intimidating, creating preconceived notions with novice anglers, but this should not be! Since most of our guests have cast a regular fishing rod, the motion of the fly cast is counter intuitive, and this is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome with our lessons. Romanticized in movies for its beautiful loops and perfectly timed false casts, fly fishing has been given a mystique it doesn’t quite deserve – fishin’ is fishin’! To help relate the cast to beginning anglers, we start with the basics and leave the A River Runs Through It “shadow cast” at the theatre.

To better understand the mechanics, we first have to understand why fly fishing is a vastly different motion from conventional angling. With a spinning rod, the weight of your bait, whatever it may be, pulls the line off the reel when you sling it out. In comparison, the flies are propelled by the line, which is already pulled off the reel. This is because the bugs being imitated are minuscule; they have no weight. The rod and the line have to do the casting for us, and you cannot rely on the strength of your arm.

Starting the cast with a firm pickup of the line, using your elbow as the pivot point, you have to “load the rod,” letting the weight of the line bend the rod tip on the back end of the cast. This generates all of our power. The pause on the back end is like pulling a lever that will do the work for you, and all you have to do now is come forward to a firm stop. Stopping the rod on the front end allows the tension built on the back cast to unload all of the inertia developed. Using the face of a clock as reference, the timing between the stopping points of 1 o’clock and 10 o’clock becomes paramount to putting it all together. Of course, there have been books written just on the cast, but like I said, keeping it simple is the easiest way to teach.

Seeing and feeling the motion for yourself is the only way to truly understand the art of the cast. Blackberry’s professional guides would be happy to put a rod in your hand and help you on this journey.

– Bryan Begbie, Fly Fishing Manager