Warning! The following contains material that may result in recollection of painful fly-casting experiences.
Picture-perfect loops, pinpoint accuracy, and effortless distance — who doesn’t want a rod that can do all that without causing your frontal lobes to blow a fuse? Many fly fishers spend a lot of time and a fair chunk of cash searching for the perfect rod. I know I have. Then one day, while casting into a lazy surf, everything became crystal clear. The perfect rod was not an enigma anymore.
It’s Most Likely You
This is going to seriously harsh your buzz, but it needs to be said — you are highly unlikely to find the perfect rod if you don’t know how a good cast actually feels. That’s right, Y-chromosome folks, casting is mainly about feelings. A good caster doesn’t go through a strictly choreographed set of movements so much as she or he responds to the way the rod feels throughout the casting stroke. Joan Wulff explains this nicely in her book Fly Casting Techniques. “As a dance teacher, I taught a lot of ‘steps’ to would-be dancers. There’s a world of difference between the two” — steps and dancing. Steps are discrete movements. A dance is all one flow. I have seen many people (mostly women) pick up a fly rod and cast well in as little as an hour. I have also watched many people (all men) who have been fly fishing for decades, yet have little or no idea why their casts are, at best, mediocre. They cast adequately enough in good conditions, but a bit of wind or the need to hit a distant target quickly throws them off their game. Frustrated, most decide the rod is the problem.
Placebo Effect
Many folks refuse to make the effort to cast well and try to compensate by purchasing new and often expensive gear instead. Even doctors and engineers, who really should know better, will ignore the obvious and spend serious money on gear that they hope, against all reason, will fix their casting faults. The strange thing is, for a short time, they may be partly right. In the world of pharmaceuticals, pills with no active ingredients have been shown to have a statistically significant effect on all kinds of illnesses. This is the famous placebo effect. It turns out the placebo effect also applies to nonmedical fields. A recent study showed that novice golfers actually played better when they thought they were using an expensive club. It seems logical to assume the same thing would apply to fly fishing, since golf swings and casting are not that different. But before you decide to part with the kind of money that will cover the monthly lease on a Tesla, understand this: the effect is transitory. Unless you are prepared to buy two or three expensive new rods for every fishing trip, you’ll be back to square one in short order.
An Honest Assessment
Before you buy your next rod, ask yourself two questions. Are my casting loops too wide? Do I make tailing loops? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, you are not a good caster. This is unlikely to be news to you. You have two options — learn to cast well, or just keep doing what you are doing. If the effort needed to cast well just seems like too much hassle, the rod selection process is pretty simple. As Lefty Kreh and others have mentioned countless times, 90 percent of the rods on the market will cast better than 90 percent of the casters. Don’t get too hung up about the logo on the rod or how much it costs. Get whatever rod you like and can afford. It won’t make any significant difference in your casting or fishing success.
If you decide to learn how to cast well, the rod selection process becomes a tad more complicated, but not impossibly so. First of all, delay any purchase until you have ironed out those wide loops and tailing loops. Depending on how much time you can commit, this could mean waiting a few weeks or months. Once you cast reasonably well and know how a good cast feels, you will also have the ability to differentiate between rods. This is when the somewhat subjective, but highly important issue of rod feel comes into play.
Feelings
Now it’s time to address “feel,” the one element of casting that really is related to your choice of gear. Most modern rods provide enough feedback to be decent sticks. However, what you are looking for is the perfect rod, one that most closely matches your body’s biomechanics. In all likelihood, there are several rods (possibly dozens) which will fit the category. You may already own such a stick. If not, you’ll just have to do some smart rod shopping.
You can’t assume a rod will be a good fit if all you have to go on is the manufacturer’s information. This isn’t the company’s fault. The designer can’t possibly know and account for every fly fisher’s physical makeup and personal idiosyncracies. And as anyone who has cast a number of rods can tell you, rod companies have different design philosophies, resulting in rods that feel slightly different. A couple of examples may help to illustrate this.
Casting involves a rod and a line. If these two components aren’t matched, it can be harder to feel the cast and to drop your fly on target. Recently, a manufacturer sent me a new 8-weight rod to try out. I took the rod and some lines for a test drive at a local lake. I strung up a weight-forward 8-weight floater and started casting. Roll casts, short accuracy casts, and double-hauled distance casts all sailed out beautifully.
Things were going well, so I decided to see how it handled a shooting head. I screwed on a reel loaded with a 10-weight head, since many rods seem to do best with a head that is about two line weights over their rating. That’s when things got weird. The rod started to behave as if it was a surly, uncommunicative teenager. I adjusted my stroke and timing, but to no avail. Finding no love at 280 grains, I decided to add some mass and looped on an 11-weight head. Things improved a little, but the rod was still not talking to me in a language I understood. I figured the rod needed an even heavier line, but this seemed counterintuitive, since it behaved so nicely with a WF8. I decided to see if Larry Kenney (the rod expert who started this column) and line guru Bruce Richards had any ideas. Larry suggested I try a much heavier shooting head. Bruce agreed. An hour later, I was at a nearby sports field with the rod and 30 feet of T14 weighing 420 grains, a whopping 50 percent more mass than the 10-weight head. Almost immediately, the rod was talking to me again.
Sometimes a rod simply isn’t right for you. For almost a decade, I had been very happy with a particular 7-weight rod for my surf-fishing trips. Like a happily married couple, we had the occasional minor disagreements (yes, I was always at fault), but generally, we got along very well. Then I decided to shoot some video of a wide-open surf striper bite. I mounted a camera onto a stripped-down Fenwick tuna stick that was securely speared into the sand. Lost in the act of casting to splashing fish, I forgot about the camera. I hauled into a cast, and my fly found the Fenwick. Milliseconds later, there was a sound that reminded me of a stone hitting a windshield at freeway speed. Suddenly, my fly rod had an extra butt section. Later that day I called the manufacturer and arranged to have the rod replaced with a newer model.
The following week, my replacement stick arrived. I returned to the scene of the crime, this time without the murderous camera mount. The rod felt numb during the first few casts. I chalked this up to unfamiliarity and assumed I would soon get things dialed in. I was wrong. No matter what I did, we were not a happy couple. A subsequent trip to the sports field with a selection of lines did not improve things. No matter which line I tried or how I varied my stroke and timing, the rod did not provide the feedback I needed to make fluid casts. We simply weren’t meant for each other.
So rule number one is never settle on a rod until you have cast it with your own line(s). The good news is that there is no rule number two.
Four-Step Program
How do you actually go about vetting a rod for compatibility? It’s pretty simple. All you need are a rod, your favorite line(s), and a leader with a tag of yarn similar in size to the flies you typically use. The test involves four simple steps.
Start with 5 or 10 feet of fly line out of the tip. There will be days when the fishing deities smile on you, and you’ll need to make short, precise casts to feeding fish. The rod should flex enough to allow you to feel what is going on at short range. This is where some of the superfast sticks can be a bit challenging.
Roll casts are an important part of fly fishing and obviously essential if you are buying a double-hander. Swing the rod through a few rolls (Speys, Snap Ts, or Perry Pokes for the double-handers) before moving on to the rest of the test. This can be challenging on grass or asphalt, since you won’t have a good anchor to load the rod. Try to find a quiet piece of water. It doesn’t have to be large or deep — even a parking lot rain puddle or a wet tarp will do in a pinch.
The next step is to add distance in increments of 5 or 10 feet. This will start to bring the middle and butt sections of the rod into play. You should be able to add distance without sacrificing feel or accuracy. Pay special attention to how each rod feels when casting at your typical fishing distances. In all likelihood, there will be a range of distances where each rod is at its most responsive. This is the rod’s sweet spot, and you’ll want this to match up with your normal fishing casts.
The final test is to throw a few distance bombs. You probably won’t need to fish at long distance very often, but when you do, you’ll want to make sure the rod is up to the task. With the exception of sub5-weight sticks, most rods should have no trouble hitting 70 feet in the hands of a proficient caster.
Your perfect rod is one that casts well and feels right in all four tests. You will probably find that more than one rod fits the bill. My suggestion is that you pick the one that feels the best with the typical casts you’d make with that rod. For a small-stream rod, that probably means roll casts and accurate shots up to 30 feet, while a saltwater stick will obviously need to roll cast well and also punch out a long line. Don’t be too surprised if your perfect rod isn’t the most expensive one. I have two perfect rods that cost less than $250.
Testing
Perhaps the easiest way to test rods is to try a friend’s rod while you are fishing. If that doesn’t work out, you have the following options: brick-and-mortar fly shops, the Internet, and fly-fishing shows. According to Google, there are still 20 fly-fishing stores in California. With the resilience of an endangered steelhead run, these businesses have survived by doing all the right things against seemingly impossible odds. Find the nearest store and call them to see if they have rods you can try out. If they do, grab a reel or two loaded with your favorite lines and make a road trip. Give yourself at least an hour to cast as many rods as you can.
The Internet offers pluses and minuses. One of the nice things about buying online is you usually get to return the product, at little or no cost, if you aren’t satisfied. The downside is there are so many rods on the market that you won’t know if the rod is right for you until it arrives and you actually get to cast it. If you go this route, it may take weeks to get the right stick.
Alternatively, every winter, the show circuit goes into full swing. These tackle bazaars are well attended by rod makers, including some smaller outfits you may not have heard of. The vendors are usually only too happy to listen to your needs and put a rod in your hand. All you need to do is find an empty section of water or grass and put each rod through the four-step evaluation process. The ability to talk face to face with rod makers and then try their products makes the shows a fine way to find that special stick.
Flow and the Perfect Rod
I imagine a number of you are still on the fence about making the effort to cast well and do the four-step rod tests. If so, you might want to consider the following. Have you ever found yourself so completely immersed in an activity that everything seems to happen intuitively and effortlessly, with time seeming to slow down? Research indicates that these experiences occur when a potent mix of neurochemicals flood the brain, creating a super-focused state. Psychologists refer to this as being in a “flow state” (Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi) or as a “peak experience” (Abraham Maslow). Athletes go to great lengths to enter a flow state, because it enables them to perform at their absolute best.
The experience is also a key part of spiritual life. For thousands of years, Hindus and Buddhists have achieved this state through meditation. The description of tai chi chuan as “meditation in motion” seems particularly relevant to fly casting. Regardless of whether you approach this from a scientific or spiritual perspective, there’s no denying the effect is incredibly powerful. To quote author Steven Kottler, “flow is a state of consciousness when we feel our best and perform our best.”
The good news is you can experience flow when fly fishing. I know because it has happened to me plenty of times, and I have spoken to others who have also experienced it. When you are in flow, your loops are perfectly formed, and the fly lands in the right spot every single time. Instead of thinking about the cast, you simply let it happen. You’d swear you were dreaming, but you know you aren’t. To use a popular saying, you really are “one” with the rod. These moments are usually brief, lasting perhaps a few minutes, but they can go on for an hour or more. Quite apart from the positive effect on your casting, the neurochemicals create a sense of well-being that can best be described as euphoric, hence the term “peak experience.” This truly is one of the ultimate experiences in fly fishing. There are a number of factors that influence how easily and how often you get into a flow state. For fly fishing, the most important are mastering basic casting skills and having the perfect rod.
