We are going to talk about the false cast now. This is the single most important fundamental portion of the fly cast. The false cast, if you don't have this right, none of the other stuff that we are going to talk about through the segment is going to work. So you have to have a perfect false cast, in order, to make the entire cast work well. So when you are going to start out or we are going to start out, what I am going to do is I am going to strip off a little bit of fly line and this is what's going to be known, as kind of your working line or your managing line.
And in a river situation this is going to just down, by my feet or it is just going to flow in the river and it is going to be right there for us. But this is the line that we are going to work with where we are going to actually gain distance and so on. The other hand, your left hand is going to be your control hand. This hand is just holding on to that fly line. So the first thing, we'll do, is we are getting to that stance that we talked about earlier, left foot forward a little bit, my right foot just set a little bit back, my thumb is comfortably sitting on top of the cork.
Now, we are going to begin the false cast. I am going to just feet out little bit off line. I am going to start out with my tip down to the ground like this, my elbow off to my side, very comfortable and very relaxed. Now, what I am going to do is I am going to do the acceleration to the stop, just like we set earlier. I am taking my forearm, I am accelerating to a stop and I am going to just simply allow the line to fall down, behind me in the grass.
So I am going to start with my hand down here, elbow down, accelerate to a stop; and allow the line to fall down, behind me. Now that is 50% of the false cast, half of it is done. We are going to make the front cast. I am going to accelerate to a stop and leave the line fall down, in front of me. So you can see that is the full cast, a back cast and a front cast. Important, no line on this hand now, accelerate to a stop, accelerate to a stop, accelerate to a stop, accelerate to a stop. This is the combined false cast. This is going back, forward, back, forward; that is the false cast. Then I am going to lay it down.
Now we have the basics down, accelerate to a stop, accelerate to a stop; the thing I want to show you is, if I break my wrist when I am making these false casts I want you to see what happens. These are good false casts, now as soon as I break my wrist here, is what's happening. This is called an open loop. In the air in a fly cast what's going to happen when I make that back cast, is you are going to see the fly line go through the air and it's going to kind of make a candy cane, through the air. I'll kind of show you here, it kind of just unrolls behind, me and it unrolls in front, of me, it unrolls.
Now what I want to do before, I come forward on that false cast, I am going to accelerate to a stop, I am going to wait for that fly line to unfold before I come forward and the same thing holds true on the front cast. When my fly line unfolds on the front cast, that's when I want to come back. That's referred to as timing. So here is what it looks like. Okay, now if I use my wrist, in that same motion here is what's happening. That loop is giant and it has no power, it has no speed, it has no absolutely no aerodynamics and when you are fishing short, you can get away with it. But what will happen, is this is going to cripple you down, the road when you start, to get distance and when we talk about shooting line later on, when we talk about, double hole it will cripple you.
Look what's happening and look at how much slower that line is traveling when I am using my wrist. When I put just the forearm in, here is just the forearm, I get speed, I get control and eventually I will gain a lot more distance. That's the basics of the false cast. When you start kind of screwing up and you are having a difficult time with it, take the rod out of your hand, set it down on the ground and make those motions again. Think about, those motions, accelerate to a stop, accelerate to a stop. The timing, the line has to unfold. That is the basics of the false cast and now, that we have learned the false cast and you can practice that then, we are going to get into shooting line.
What shooting line is going to do for us in the next, sequence is it's going to gain, more distance. Once you have this technique down, the false casting, you can now, go out and fish, you can present your flag to a fish. But what if that fish is further away, from you than 10 feet or 15 feet. How do you get distance? Well, as a beginner people sometimes try to get distance through power. They simply will make the false cast like this and they will toss it out there and try to get distance, it doesn't work like that.
We need to be smooth, we need to make very nice false cast like this and then we are going to use a technique called shooting line, and shooting line will be the next, component that we get into. Now we are going to talk a little bit about, the plain of the rod itself and what I mean by the plain of the rod is when I am making the cast, does my fly rod need to come straight up over the top of my body, like this, straight. Well that's a Joan Wulff school of casting and Joan Wulff is a tremendously, tremendously good fly casting instructor and her complete theory in casting, is that the rod is traveling on an arc straight over the top of your head, just like this, a straight plane over the top of your head.
Then another, gentleman by the name of Lefty Cray has another, theory in fly-casting and what Lefty had said, is that it doesn't matter where your rod is, if it is up here, or if it is down here as long as the tip of the rod is traveling on a straight plane; meaning that you are kind of drawing a line in a straight line with the tip of the rod either here or as Joan Wulff said here. The most important part is that you are drawing a straight line with the tip and what I mean by that is I don't want to see these little S, turns in your fly-cast like this.
Some people will start casting and they will start doing this, bring in the rod around like this. No, you can cast off, to that little 45 degree angle, but that rod has to be drawing a straight line creating a straight plane; that's the most important, part of where is the direction of your fly line actually going to head. Now what we are going to do is we are get into shooting line, let's get some distance. Now we are going to gain some distance in your fly-cast shooting line.
First we want to make sure that you have the false cast down adequately, because that's going to determine, how much line you are going to be able to shoot. What shooting line is going to allow me to do is gain that extra 10, 20, 30, 40 feet to my false cast itself. And how shooting line works, is we are going to still make those good hard false stops, boom, boom, boom; but on eye makes that front cast and my rod accelerates to a stop on the front cast, I am going to allow a little bit of line to slip through my index finger and my thumb.
Now I will let you kind of take a peek at that. I will make a false cast and on each cast, when I stop my rod abruptly, forward I am going to let a little slip through. A little slip through, a little slip through and that added maybe another 10-20 feet to my cast, by just allowing a little to slip through. The important part of that is that you only can allow, that line to slip through when your rod accelerates to a stop. When your rod stops abruptly here, that's when you let the line slip through. If you don't you will be making false cast like this and if you try to let it go here, it's all going to fall apart on you.
So you just make those false casts, you stop abruptly and let that little bit allowing slip through on that front cast. Now the second way which is my preferred, way of shooting line is I am going to create a donut or an O with my thumb and index finger on this cast. What I will do, is I am going to make my false casts, just like it was before, and when it's time to shoot the line, what I am going to do is with my thumb and index finger I am going to make that little donut, just like that and allow that line to slip through. I'll do it again, for you so you can take a look at that. Just like this, now it's time to shoot the line, stop; the line slips through and I just gained that extra distance that I need.
Now the thing, that's very important here, is when you do make that front cast the stop allow the line to shoot out and then bring the rod tip down. A very fundamental mistake that a lot of you are going to make in your fly-cast, is when you are making that front cast, like this and it's time to deliver the fly to the fish you are going to go like this. You are not going to make that stop, you are just going to walk right through it, you don't want to do that. You want to stop the rod and bring the tip down.
And that's how you would present that actually to the fish. But I will show you a little longer cast now. And this is what can be obtained with shooting line. So from only being able, to cast maybe 20 or 30 feet here, now what I can do with shooting line, is I just got 50 or 60 feet out with very little effort at all, as you can see the casting stroke, is very smooth and the line just took off, that shooting line.
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