One of the hurdles faced by fly fishers is figuring out how to cast full sinking lines. You can get along just fine with a floater or a sink-tip line on creeks and rivers, but a full sinker can be vital to success on lakes or in salt water. The problem is that casting these lines, especially the extra fast-sinking versions, can be quite scary. It usually doesn’t take too many casts before the fly comes perilously close to hitting you or the rod. This is when many folks decide this isn’t for me. Thankfully, there’s a fairly easy way to avoid impalement and actually enjoy fishing sinkers.

Chuck and Duck Sucks

While you can use your regular cast with intermediate and some of the slow-sinking lines, it be can inadequate with fast sinkers. Sinking lines travel faster through the air than floaters, which tends to magnify casting errors, often resulting in a whiplashing fly. This is what causes those scary moments. A common casting adaptation for these lines is something called the “chuck and duck.” The chuck part is basically a high-arcing forward stroke, often driven by shoulder rotation. This is followed by a rapid, full-body genuflection, the duck. The whole thing is so ungainly that a bystander might be excused for thinking they’re watching someone working on a thrash-metal dance move.

What makes the chuck and duck problematic is that the forward cast does not necessarily result in the line following a smooth upward trajectory. Instead, it often behaves like a jet fighter taking off from an aircraft carrier, with a significant increase in upward trajectory right behind the angler’s back. This change of direction can turn the fly into a malevolent killer bee. If you don’t quickly drop into a fetal curl, it may sting you in the back, neck, or head. In the worst-case scenario, you may even need a doctor to remove the hook. From a casting and fishing perspective, the chuck and duck sucks.

A Good Enough Cast

So what can we do? One option would be to don personal protective gear. A riot suit with a visored helmet and upper body armor can be obtained for about the same cost as a mid-priced fly rod. You can fish in whatever gear you like, but looking like Darth Vader flailing away with a nine-foot lightsaber could result in someone calling 911 and suggesting a mental health check.

A more practical alternative is to get help from a certified casting instructor or build a better cast by watching casting videos and dedicating several hours of time to casting practice. But let’s be honest. Many folks have neither the time nor the inclination to do either.

There’s a third option that will get the job done without the need for hours of practice. It’s based on a recognized style of casting, but at its basic level. The aim is to develop a cast that is good enough to get the fly out safely and quickly so you can concentrate on fishing. You’ll probably need half an hour or so to learn the basic stroke, and a good chunk of that time will be spent laughing at the inevitable flubs.

Casting By Subtraction

As countless fly-fishing writers have pointed out, the rod acts as a lever, turning a small rotation at the grip into a much longer one at the tip. This lever effect also means that any slight misdirection of a skeletal joint or uneven application of muscle power will result in a magnified error at the tip. The more joints and muscles you use to make a cast, the more chances the rod tip will go in the wrong direction, with the line following suit. While you may be able to get away with a few small errors using a floating line, a sinker, with its higher line speed, tends to be less forgiving. The fewer muscles and joints you use to make a cast, the less likely you are to flub it.

The sidearm cast is a recognized casting style that is often used when fishing for bonefish, permit, or tarpon. This cast keeps the elbow close to the body, forcing the upper arm to act as a sort of hinge, which significantly reduces the number of muscles and joints involved in the cast. In addition to providing better control, the cast also develops plenty of line velocity. This is where the extra speed of a sinker turns out to be a blessing. You can use a sidearm cast to throw a sinking line 50 feet or more with surprisingly little effort.

Interior Decorating

One of the Catch-22 situations with fly casting is you inevitably will make better casts if you know how a good cast feels. Instructors sometimes place their hand over the pupil’s hand to guide them through the casting stroke. This gives a sense of the direction and speed, but the instructor’s grasp tends to mask the subtle tactile sense of the rod’s leverage in the pupil’s hand.

Short practice rods with yarn lines are good for getting the timing of a cast in an indoor setting, but don’t generate quite enough leverage to replicate the complete feel of a full rod and line. It turns out you can duplicate the hand feel of a good sidearm-style cast by running a dry paintbrush against a wall or door. A one-inch to one-and-a-half-inch-wide trim brush works well.

Lightly hold the paintbrush using a thumb-on-top style casting grip, with your palm facing up and the wide side of the brush parallel to the floor. Gently tuck your elbow against your body, hold your forearm just above horizontal and move it back until you reach the limit of shoulder rotation. Touch the tip of the brush against the wall and make a slow, horizontal painting stroke, using your elbow as a pivot point. The bristles of the brush will progressively bend backward as you make the stroke and then spring up at the end of the stroke. Make smooth, gentle strokes in both directions to duplicate the forward cast and the back cast.

It’s really important to pay attention only to the sensations in your hand. Ignore everything else. During the forward stroke, notice the increase in pressure on the thumb, pinkie, and ring fingers. On the back cast, the pressure will be against the forefinger, middle finger, and the palm. If you are having trouble noticing these sensations, you are probably holding the brush too tightly. Ideally, the brush should move slightly in your hand with each stroke. Make sure you are really memorizing these sensations — they will speed up the learning curve. Closing your eyes will help remove any visual distractions. A few minutes of pretend painting should be all you need.

Gear Selection

While it is by no means essential, a sinking line with a short belly section and a brightly colored running line will make things easier. The short belly (25 to 30 feet) allows you to get the weighted section of the fly line out of the rod tip without needing lots of false casts, and the brightly colored running line makes it easy to see when this has happened. Scientific Anglers, Orvis, RIO, and Cortland all have lines that will do the job. For learning the cast, just use a leader made from 5 feet of 15-to-20-pound-test mono and top it off with a fake fly made from several strands of brightly colored yarn. Don’t use a real fly for practicing, because you are bound to have some casts that go awry.

Making the Cast

I could describe the cast with several carefully worded paragraphs, but there’s really no point. Bruce Chard has already done a great job in a YouTube video titled “Wrist Snap for Line Speed” (use the QR code below to take you to the video). Don’t let the title of the video confuse you — there’s no need to use the wrist to make this basic cast. The relevant section of the video, which starts at 35 seconds and ends at 45 seconds, shows how Mr. Chard uses only his forearm. Play the clip at regular speed a couple of times and then reduce the speed (use the settings “gear” icon at the bottom of the video) to 0.5 times regular so you can see the action more clearly. You’ll note that it is almost identical to what happens in the paintbrush simulation. The reason this cast works so well with sinking lines is that the power is generated in an easy-to-control arc that keeps the line well away from the body.

Start with about 15 feet of fly line outside the rod tip and move the rod just fast enough to get the line going back and forth. Hold the rod gently, so you can notice when the feeling in your hand is similar to the one you experienced with the paintbrush. Once you are making decent casts and feel comfortable with the stroke, slip out an extra foot or so of line during the cast. If anything goes wrong, just drop the cast and shorten the line by a foot. Keep adding line in comfortable increments until the brightly colored running line is at the rod tip. Once you can false cast the entire belly section of the line, you are ready to shoot the line.

Peel off another twenty feet of running line from the reel and strip it onto the ground. Start casting with 15 or 20 feet out of the rod tip and feed additional line out as you false cast. Once the colored running line is at the rod tip, make one more forward cast and let go of the line as soon as you stop the rod. If you are having difficulty using the stop to signal when to shoot line, just watch the line coming off the rod tip. As soon as you see the loop form, let go of the line.

Once you get the timing right, the belly section will pull an extra 10 to 20 feet of running line through the guides, yielding 40-to-50-foot casts. Put in enough practice, and you should be able to churn out 60-foot casts, which is farther than many folks can cast any line.

Teething Problems

Perhaps the most common issue with this type of cast is unconsciously allowing your elbow to move away from your torso. A couple of inches won’t make too much difference, but anything more can affect the geometry of the cast and screw things up. If you start noticing you are getting sloppy loops or leader tangles, your elbow may be to blame. If you are having trouble with your elbow creeping out, try practicing with a paperback book between your upper arm and torso. It’s a very old training technique that has fallen out of favor, but is helpful in this situation.

Another potential fault is extending the casting hand too far forward on the final forward cast. A short movement of two or three inches to facilitate shooting the running line is fine, but anything more is an indication something is wrong. The most likely reason for overextending the arm is compensating for uneven power application, which often causes the line to develop a tailing loop and can result in a tangled leader. The excessive forward arm movement opens the loop, reducing the risk of a tangle, but that wide loop will diminish distance and accuracy. The answer is to go back to the smooth, relaxed paintbrush stroke you developed in practice.

Uneven power application often comes from putting more “oomph” than is necessary into the cast. This is more likely to plague folks who have a Y chromosome, but double Xers can overdo it, too. Remember, this cast takes advantage of the higher line speed of a sinker. Overpowering the cast can result in the fly tangling the leader or bouncing off the rod. Stick with the relaxed stroke you used in practice, and you’ll be spending more time fishing and less time untangling leaders or replacing blunted flies.

There are a couple of things that will make fishing these lines a bit easier. First of all, fly lines are designed to work with a leader, though for these lines, it doesn’t have to be fancy. A straight piece of 15-to-20-pound mono about 6 feet long will do the job most of the time. If you would like a tapered leader, Scientific Anglers Absolute Streamer and RIO’s Big Nasty fit the bill. One advantage of these leaders is they won’t cut into the welded loop on the end of the fly line, which thinner monofilaments can do.

Unless it is absolutely essential, it’s best not to use heavily weighted flies with fast-sinking lines. These flies have a tendency to kick quite hard when the casting loop unrolls, resulting in a whiplashing fly. If it hits the top section of the rod, it can easily shatter the graphite. A fast-sinking or extra fast-sinking line will pull most unweighted flies down through the water at six to eight inches per second, which is plenty fast enough for the majority of fishing situations.

This basic sidearm cast will enable you to fish sinking lines safely and effectively under most fishing situations. It is also a good foundational stroke for more advanced casts, such as the wrist snap move that Mr. Chard shows in his video. All you need to get started is a paintbrush and a fly line.