Casting and Catching
- Details
- Published on Tuesday, 02 November 2010 18:31
- Written by Bob Wyatt
Casting is at the heart of fly-fishing. We’d all like to become a top gun distance caster. The ability to put out a long line when you need it is a good thing, and a lot of fun, no argument, but the importance of approach and presentation is often ignored or just worked out while fishing. The result is that the target area gets lined before that one correct drag-free drift is made, and the fish - especially a big fish - is usually spooked. This is beginner’s stuff, everyone knows it, and the books and magazines are full of it. Surprising then that it should be where most presentations fall flat.
The popular trout rods these days are nearly all capable of thirty-yard plus casts, and it’s a prime selling point, despite the fact that it’s nearly impossible to sink a barb on a light tippet at that range, and the break off rate is high due to the inertia of the line on the water. Because of the tippet weights required to fish at a distance, the lining of the water, and the impossibility of controlling the line in any current, big distance is achieved in inverse proportion to the number of fish caught, especially on moving water. But it’s just as important on the lochs. A visit to any popular stillwater will demonstrate the effect of lining the water by long casting. Once the boys line up along the bank, only the rankest stockies swim within the twenty-yard fish-free zone during daylight hours.
On New Zealand’s crystalline rivers, drag is uppermost in your mind at all times. With those big one-shot trout you get no second chance. The Kiwi trout angler likes to sneak in very close, cast from behind cover or from his haunches, and present his fly at as shallow an angle as possible. Straight across or downstream is often preferable to a straight upstream cast. A downstream approach is normally avoided since, obviously, the trout is looking upstream.
And that’s just the horizontal angles. The trout’s window of perception is another set of angles everyone knows about and usually ignores. Just last summer I watched my brother John, turned out for hot weather in a bright white T-shirt and white straw cowboy hat, working up a nice deep run on BC’s Elk River. We’d already given him hell about this outfit on another stream, where he was roundly skunked while everyone else caught fish. He was doing better on the big river, but he was forced to fish at such long distance that he was having problems with drag and missing half the rises he got. 
Any fish within fifteen yards had stopped rising or had moved, but by making long casts across the big slick John’s glaring white hat was at least below the trouts’ angle of vision. Wading deeper and doing more to position himself better would have allowed a shorter line and better reaction times. Best of all would be if John just left that damned hat in the truck. It made hard work out of it and certainly cut his chances in half (I conveniently blamed most of my own blown chances on John’s hat).
We don’t think enough of this stuff in Scotland. You don’t often see a Scottish fly fisher sneaking up on a pool like they do in New Zealand. We tend to stride up to the water like a Victorian gunnery sergeant and start waving a rod around in plain sight of everything for twenty yards. You commonly hear the advice to not wade the bank on a wild loch, so as to not spook the fish along the shore. I’m convinced the common assumption that Scottish wild lochs are full of wee trout is largely due to this advice. It would be different if we could see the fish in the water they way you can in New Zealand, and we’d learn fast when we saw those trout scoot for cover at our approach.
The best way to fish a loch from your legs is to get right in there up to your waist and keep moving. Working along a shore like this is far more productive than standing up proudly on the shoreline and belting out twenty yards of fly line. Good presentation is a matter of hunting rather than chuck and chance it - assume the trout can see you, stay low and watch your background, keeping movements to a minimum, getting close, fishing a short line, a low rod, and working out the angles. Once you have all that worked out, it’s maybe time to start worrying about that killer fly pattern.
First pulished in the oringinal Fish Wild June 2006
Bob Wyatt was born in Alberta Canada and has been fly fishing since the fifties. Bob writes for several fly fishing magazines, spends the trout season in NZ, and hosts the FFF Southern Fly Fishing Conclave at Middlemarch each year. Currently, he is just finishing his new book "What Trout Want".
On The Fly productions has just released a two part DVD featuring Bob’s go-to flies, how to tie them, and why and how he fishes them.
Bob loves fly fishing’s traditions and lore, and although he thinks most of it is nonsense he believes it’s as important as anything else in his life, maybe more so. His last book Trout Hunting: The Pursuit of Happiness is clear evidence that he has taken the whole thing too far.
Check out Bob’s web site at http://www.trouthunting.co.nz