Antietam Fly Anglers Casting Club

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Antietam Fly Anglers Casting Club featuring


FFF Certified Casting Instructor Robert Stouffer

AFA "Bob Abraham" Casting Club

The AFA Casting Club helps participants to improve their casting skills. It is an outdoor activity for practice, education and development. Currently, there is an FFF Certified Casting Instructor and other members who share the duties of presenting a skill and give encouragement and tips to the members. It is intended that the members who attend regularly will gain mastery of casting fundamentals and the ability to teach others.

Each session begins with some aspect of the Fundamental Casting Stroke. We then move to the skill for the day. The sessions usually last an hour and a half.

You will need a basic training rod, reel, floating line and 7 1/2 foot 2x leader. If you do not own fly casting equipment, email Bob Stouffer and he will scrounge one up to use on a temporary basis.

Bob' Training Tip for January 2009

Joys of Winter
You sit by the fireside, eggnog in hand, reviewing last years fishing triumphs and pleasures. Perhaps one of the triumphs that you review is the learning of the haul. The haul smoothed some of the bothersome waves that follow your loop, the loop was tighter, the cast was longer and the layout straighter. A canoe glides past carrying a Pomeranian with a little plaid jacket propelled by a man and woman outfitted by Abercrombie and Fitch. Beautiful fly casting, says one, and the Pomeranian agrees. It is the haul, you say. Your popper lands near a rock and the water explodes as the twenty-inch smallmouth shoots skyward in a gleaming, quivering leap. This remembrance a pleasure and triumph.

Certainly, the haul is a great assistant. Not only does the increased line speed and improved loop propel the wind-resistant fly farther, the haul also spreads the work to both arms and lessens the tiring effect of the thousand or so casts that you sometimes make in a day. The haul may be essential in wind conditions to minimize the amount of time that the line is in the air. The haul also makes you look and feel more balanced if accomplished correctly hauling on-line with the rod guides in a 180 degree relationship to the line travel.

The haul, however, can be a masquerade. It can hide deficiencies in your foundation casting stroke. My father was fond of saving energy in the 1950,s and 1960,s and walked behind us turning off lights and checking our bath-water depth. Our 54 Plymouth Savoy had three speeds on the column shifter. It bothered me as a child of 10 years when he skipped second gear and went directly from first to third "saves gas", he said. You could hear the engine labor slightly and you could hear some valve noise. This skipping of what I considered to be an important step in the stick-shift driving process is a metaphor for using the haul prior to making essential improvements in the foundation casting stroke. If you want to get the maximum line speed and distance benefit from the haul, learn first to make a clean and efficient thirty-five to fifty foot cast without a haul and without shooting line. Then practice shooting line. Learn to make a good-loop backcast while carrying the entire head of the line outside the rod-tip (40 to 45 feet of line [not including the leader] varies with the manufacturer,s taper). With a good backcast (the backcast is the key) you can learn to shoot thirty or forty feet of line on the front cast without hauling. Start short and add a foot or two whenever your loops look good and the cast lays-out straight with a straight leader. The learning process is incremental.

While you are having your eggnog in comfort, consider your incremental fundamental casting stroke improvements as pleasurable and triumphant.

Bob's March 2008 Training Tip

When practicing casting, wear a hat, wear sun-glasses or other eye protection. Begin by stretching and making short casts. Practice for fifteen minutes per day and concentrate on one skill at a time. Practice making 30 to 40 foot casts with a tight loop that does not have the energy to straighten and does not reach the target. Use a small ball of yarn (about the size of a dime or less) as a practice fly. Whatever the skill that you are practicing, cast to a target. Evaluate each of your casts and change your mechanics to produce a different result. Remember; one definition of "insanity" is to repeat the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result."

Bob's April 2008 Training Tip

I recently asked a very very good fly tyer how long it takes for a person with no formal training to learn to tie a Catskill fly. He said that after four hours of instruction, practicing a couple flies a day for a week and then a full dozen flies in one sitting, a person should be able to tie a fishable fly. It would take years of practice to be able to produce a Catskill fly worthy to place on a fly plate.

Casting is not different than any other physical endeavor. It takes training for the motor skills to produce a good loop on command. It is not a skill that we are born with. Train prior to going fishing. Learn to load the rod by accelerating from zero miles per hour to 2 or 3 miles per hour and stop the rod cold at an attitude of approximately 90 degrees from your target in both the backcast and front-cast. Slow casting like this yields the most lasting results.

Now, back to the Catskill fly. There is a parallel. It takes four hours of instruction and practice to learn a skill (such as casting a 24 inch loop at 30 feet). If you wait a week without practice after the instruction, you will probably not be able to produce the success that you had in training. Fifteen or twenty minutes per day of casting practice, including evaluation of the cast, for thirty days will help you cement a movement that is repeatable. A good fly line used to last me three or four years. Now it is shot in six months without using it for fishing. This is your goal: render useless a great fly-tying vice through use and render useless a practice line in the next year.

Bob's May 2008 Training Tip

Next Casting and Practice Tip
This is not about PERFECTION, but it is about IMPROVEMENT. So some self evaluation. Rather than continuing to cast until the leader and line forms a basketball-sized tangle, stop and relax after each cast and look at the shape of the line on the ground. If it is a straight line pick-up and laydown cast, is the line straight? Did the leader straighten fully? Is your practice fly near your target? The six-step method of teaching is also the six-step method of self-evaluation (See Bruce Richard's Loop article, 1999).

Step 1 What did the Line do - Lets say that it made a very large loop.
Step 2 What did the Rod do - The rod tip traveled in a convex path.
Step 3 What did the Body do - Convex rod tip paths are created by the hand and arm traveling in a convex path.
Step 4 What should your Body do - To make a smaller, aerodynamic loop, the hand and arm must travel in a straight line path.
Step 5 What should your Rod do - If your rod is accelerated to a stop, the rod tip path will describe a straight line path as well.
Step 6 What will your Line do - A line propelled by the straight line path of the rod tip will form a smaller and more aerodynamic loop.

Use this method of self-evaluation to improve your casting.
Remember - if you throw a loop perfectly aligned on the eye-target line, you will not be able to see the shape of the loop. Practice casting off-plane (say a 45 degree horizontal plane) occasionally to see the loop. Use the buddy system or a cam-corder to evaluate vertical casting plane loops.

Bob's June 2008 Training Tip

Practice Roll Casting on Grass
Yes, you can roll-cast on grass. First, cut the grass. If you do not have a great place to practice casting in you yard, cut the neighbor's grass. The planton seed stalks and dente de lion shoots are detrimental to practice because they grab your leader and line in a way to counter the smooth turn-over you are looking for. Secondly, remember that the roll-cast stroke is just the front half of an aerialized casting cycle. Thirdly, the anchor must be placed properly. You need some line in front of and just to the casting hand side of you. I check my anchor by reaching with my rod-tip to touch the yarn fly. If I have to stretch slightly to the front of and to the side (on my rod-hand side) it is a good "stick" or "anchor placement". Fourth, remember where your hand-arm-rod angle would be if you were at the pause after the back-cast. Start the cast by getting into that position or make it a longer stroke as if you had "drifted" to the rear. For really long roll casts, REALLY reach back. Fifth, remember to increase the Arc proportionally as the length of line outside of the rod tip increases. Lay the rod angle back farther for a long roll cast. Sixth and finally, the stroke (no, not the medical terminology) - the Casting Stroke; start slowly and accelerate on a STRAIGHT LINE HAND PATH (move your thumbnail in a straight line) - (here is the kicker) and delay the rotational acceleration (accelerating through the Arc) until very late in the cast. The acceleration, both translational and rotational, crest in the very last several inches of the stroke.

Here is another practice tip to remember about roll casting: during the stroke, move the rod tip so that it traces a line directly above the line layout (an extension of the 180 degree principal). If your anchor is in front and just slightly to the side, the cast should be made on a vertical plane. If the anchor and layout are farther off to the side, the cast should be made horizontally. Tilt your hand-arm to mirror the line layout. This tip will pay dividends unheard of in the financial sector.

Bob' Training Tip for October 2008

Tracking
Tracking (aligning the rod plane, casting plane, back-cast target and front-cast target perfectly, so that the line goes straight and lays-out straight) Tracking the rod is a difficult skill to master. For side-arm casters, it is more difficult. The rod-tip path must be a perfectly straight line from beginning to end of the back and front cast so that the loop and following line travel the same path.

Many side-armed casters also "Drift" to create a longer stroke or wider arc for the next, generally longer, cast. Side-armed casting makes it more difficult because drift movements (intentional or otherwise) and follow through movements will pull the next rod-tip path off line. This, for an off-vertical cast, causes the line layout to often be "curved" on the subsequent cast. It causes the loop to swing in a figure of eight and affects accuracy.

First, learn to Stop and Stay
If you practice off-vertical (side-armed) casting, practice moving your rod hand on a straight line to a stop and keep the rod hand perfectly still. Watch your back-cast stop and keep the rod tip perfectly still with no movement after the stop. Stay still until the loop unrolls and you begin your forward cast. You can do this if you watch and concentrate on keeping the tip still. See if this practice is helping you get a straight line layout.

Then, learn to Stab
Now, understand what it will take to drift the rod and keep it perfectly in line. For the off-vertical caster, a drifting move is a "stabbing" move. Moreover, it is a "stabbing move" in the direction (on the axis of) your rod is pointed. Think about stabbing with a sword, except very slowly, while the line unrolls.

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