Fly Fishing Basics: Fly Casting - How to Cast a Fly Rod

I don't want to see this a lot of times when we're teaching casting people will say to me oh I know how to cast and they're doing this kind of thing we do not that that just that no no no we don't want that that it's very easy very smooth and write down play agree [Music] hey everybody al newarker here with Kass King fishing you know we've learned a lot about fly-fishing so far we've learned about the rods the reels the line maybe even some of the flies and and how to tie knots even but now it's time to learn how to actually cast a fly rod and to do that I've brought along a couple of really good friends now this is clay in sandy Roberts clay and sandy these guys they are exceptional first of all it's a husband-and-wife team they're professional fishermen professional guides but they're also master fly casters and if anybody can teach you the basics of casting a fly rod it's clay and sandy so let's give them a few minutes walk you through the basics and I think you are going to be an expert fly caster before you know it here's clay and sandy hi I'm clay Roberts casting Prostaff I'm sandy Roberts and I'm also at the cast King pro team today we are gonna talk about fly casting and we're gonna talk about the basics we're gonna start with the most basic thing that you can think of it all and that would be the grip when you're golfing you need a good grip when you're fly-fishing you need a good grip to make an accurate cast you need a good grip and what I'm talking about on the grip is how we hold the fly rod so we're gonna start with the first thing we're gonna do basic grips first thing thumb on top that's one choice that we could have next choice we could have finger on top or we could have what's called a V grip now when I'm first teaching fly casting I like to tell people to use a thumb on top grip because your thumb is your strongest finger in your hand and you and you're gonna have a lot of strength using that finger finger on top it's a very accurate grip I can virtually point to something and I can cast right to it however your finger is usually not as strong as your thumb but it is also a good grip another one would be V grip the fly line the fly rod handle is in the V of my thumb and this finger here and it would be a V grip what we don't want to see when you're casting is if I hand you the rod and you do this and you do an O grip because what happens is you'll make a big huge wide loop fly casting is very aerodynamic it you can think of an airline an airplane the nose of an airplane and how it goes through the air it's the same thing with the loop in your fly line it makes a nice tight loop to go forward a nice tight loop on your back cast we'll be going over that too but we don't want to have a grip that causes you to make this big huge rounded loop so when you're first starting to cast my recommendation would be thumb on top grip I want to talk a little bit here about something that's very related to to your grip and that's going to be line control is I'm teaching students I see a lot of times that this subject is just kind of glossed over and it's and it's not talked about and it ends up getting folks in trouble so what I want to talk about is line finger how we control the line and how we strip in line and Inlet outline you could use your index finger or you could use your middle finger to trap the line between you your finger and your in the handle and then we strip we don't ever ever really reach in front of our hand that's on the handle we work the fly line from behind we strip we strip in the line we can control our slack and and for a hook set for a fish when a fish takes your fly it's just Bing right here you trap the line right there you're on to the fish and basically we just strip the fish in if it's a small you got to kind of judge that if it's a big fish you may want to let him get to the reel but we just strip from behind the hand and bring the fish to hand to your net okay we're ready to get started on actual casting we've talked about line control and and grip we got that all nailed down and so we're gonna look at our first cast and that it's gonna be for this particular situations gonna be a roll cast one of the questions I get I sometimes get ahead of myself it shows and different things teaching people and I don't how do I get my line out the first time in order to be able to initiate a cast so we'll go over a couple of those little quick techniques and they're in they're kind of fun so first thing we have to do is strip some line off of our reel you know 20 25 foot is probably gonna be enough we're just pulling it right off the reel putting it at our feet yeah I'm just guessing that's enough we're just gonna whack it out there and so what we're gonna do now is just we have water the water's gonna grab the line water tension we may have a pond or it even works on grass we're just gonna stroke the rod no tension on this line you just you're just kind of guiding it through the rod tip and the line just goes right out on the water and we're ready to make our first roll cast okay we've got our line place that on the water we've stroked it out of the rod and we're ready to do our first roll cast so in a roll cast we start with our rod tip close to the water in almost all casts if we have the option we start with our tip of the rod close to the water or grass depends on what you're doing roll cast we're going to bring the rod back this is we call this the key position just between your good good angle here we call this the ledge right hand between your your ear and your in your shoulder and we formed what we call a D loop maybe you can see that behind me the line is draped behind my shoulder that's where it needs to be and the rod forms the face of the D hence the the D loop and we're gonna come forward this this is a waterborne cast so that so it works off of water tension the line is being grabbed by the water and so it takes just a little bit more force to make this cast and it's not not really a hard cast we just come forward as if maybe we were how to hammer in our hand and we're gonna come forward and we're gonna stop as if we're hitting a nail here that's gonna load the rod and as we stop come forward it's going to load the rod and as we stop the rods gonna unload and the line is gonna propel forward you know in a loop so to speak out over the water let's see what it looks like roll cast we stop for muddy water is grabbing the line we come forward wine just pulls out nicely above the water great cast if you have an obstacle behind you so you see clay is doing a very nice role cast here and you're saying well why why are we doing a roll cast why aren't we picking it up and doing like a river runs through it cast right we're doing a roll cast because as you see when he comes up his fly it's never leaving the water it's staying in the water and he's using the water retention and then he's throwing it back basically right it's unrolling it's going back the reason we want to do that in Colorado we have bushes and grass and rocks and all kinds of things behind you you come up on a pick up cast and you have a fly on there's a good possibility that that three-dollar fly you just bought is hooked on a tree behind you with the roll cast if there's any obstacles at all behind you you can avoid all the obstacles now never think clay can do two with the roll cast is if all of a sudden the wind is coming from his right side when he brings that rod up all he has to do is bring it to his left shoulder you see how he did that he can go to his left and go forward so we don't have wind here right now but if he did he's making the same cast but he's bringing the line up to the left now to avoid the wind that may have come from this shoulder roll cast sandy let's talk about the pickup in the lay down yeah so another cast that we'd like to do that we'd like to teach people right at the beginning would be our pickup lay down cast and it's just a basic cast basically what we're doing is we're gonna strip off line typically we like to strip off about 30 feet you're saying well why do we like to strip off 30 feet well 30 feet is about the distance and when I'm talking line I'm talking about the dark part the part at the end of the line is your leader the clearer part but I'm talking about the the actual fly line we want to strip off about 30 feet off of our reel so that we can load our rod to make our fly propel forward to probe at propel backward we're loading our rod so most manufacturers will recommend about 30 feet out of the rod tip so we were gonna wiggle some out just a little we're gonna have our rod tip down now if you see I've actually trapped my line again we don't want to do this we do want to trap it we're just gonna pick it up lay it down pick it up lay it down pick it up lay it down what you're not seeing me do is there is a pause on a on a fly cast there's a pause at the front there's a pause at the back but for now we're just doing to pick it up lay it down pick it up lay it down this is going to be a basic cast that you're going to be using if you have if you have a lot of trees and things behind you then you're gonna want to do what clay was showing you earlier and just go to your roll cast and that way my flight doesn't leave the water put a pickup lay down now one thing we tell you is pretend you have a book your most favorite book your most favorite cookbook your most favorite book have that book right next to you your elbow is here pretend that you have a book just pick up lay down pick up lay down I'm keeping my arm pretty close to my body I'm keeping everything together what I don't want to see you do I don't want to see this a lot of times when we're teaching casting people will say to me oh I know how to cast and they're doing this kind of thing we do not that that just that no no no we don't want that that it's very easy very smooth and right down play good just a real reiterate a point the role cast is a great cast to start your pick up the lay down it allows you to roll the line out and then go into your pickup in your lay down and if you mess up your overhead cast just blow it out start over there's gonna be times where we need to extend the amount of line we have out right now as an example I'm standing on a rock so if I want to get the line out farther I'm gonna need to cast a little farther so clay you're gonna tell us how that's gonna happen yeah let's let's talk about some false casting let's talk about some uses first I guess before we get get started a false cast is used to dry the fly if you're fishing a dry fly the fly will take up some water and it won't be floating so well so you can make a couple of false casts the minimum amount it just takes one or two to snap the water out of that fly a false cast can be used to lengthen the line so you can reach out to that fish as he's rising and moving away from you you can get a little further out a false cast a big use of a false cast is changing direction so that's a pretty decent loop my rod is stopping it maybe if we have a clock it's stopping at one o'clock behind us and ten o'clock in front very high getting a tight loop that is a very efficient loop for fishing it's narrow the energy is focused to the front it is very accurate and it beats the wind well so the opposite of that which generally happens because of too much arm movement and too much wrist movement is a wide open loop and it looks something kind of like this you can see how I'm making that my wrist is opening up the line is going down in the back we're gonna lose our three dollar fly in the grass very inefficient the energy is being projected around a wide open loop the wind is gonna have its way with it with you it's gonna you're going to be all over the place your presentation is going to be full pore in the front and your effort accuracy is going to suffer you know that's one of the things that we see quite a bit when we're teaching fly casting it's one of the biggest mistakes is this wrist bending too much you know when he made that s loop if you looked at his wrist it was going like this and so we need to have our wrist more like a lever more like a lever of a tractor a little bit you know a little stiffer there's a little movement in your wrist but definitely not like that and that's what's causing that s loop to occur from what I can tell is mainly the bending of your rib you want to have a firm wrist but not a stiff wrist I see people get get up in cast and somebody's told them what about bend your wrist you need to bend your wrist a little bit to make a effect I'll tell you what I wanted it's one of the tricks that we've taught people over the years if you just want to show it really quick he can take the fly fly rod handle and he's got long sleeves on one of the tricks we use to get people used to holding the rod without bending so much is putting like he did he tucked the handle of the fly rod into the end of his shirt another thing you can do to clay if you can't get it that way take your other hand just like that put your other hand use your second hand to support it to hold it straighter it will feel really weird at the beginning but once you're once you get used to this movement it's going to make it a lot easier sandy that pretty much kind of knocks out the basics of getting started in fly casting let's recap real quick and go through what we just done yeah we clay we've talked about the grips we want to make sure we have a proper grip when we're casting when we're fly fishing we want to make sure that we know how to get the line off of the reel and get the line into the water we've talked about trapping the line under your finger we've talked about doing the roll cast we did a pickup lay down Castle you've watched these clips so now it's just time to get out there and practice a little bit it just takes a little bit of practice front yard field Park or play you're out camping it'll ache just get out there and go through these things and just practice a little bit and you'll be rewarded for now we've taught you the basics I'm sandy Roberts I'm on castings pro team in stay tuned I'm clay Roberts casting protein you

Channel: KastKing

Views: 800,171

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Id: HFFh6IMXqAw

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018