Ralph is a fantastic caster who qualified for the US Team in 2023. I’m not trying to give him a hard time. To be honest, I’ve had too many similar experiences, and it’s partly from these traumas that this series of posts were born.
When I started practicing regularly in Oakland, my line would hit my rod too often during my front cast causing the leader and fly to wrap around the rod in an incredible fashion. Each time it would happen, to undo the mess, I would have to lower my reel gently to the pavement. Sometimes, it would be with a defeated sigh… other times, it would be with an angry word under my breath.
Although the tangle around the rod was always different, I was left wondering the same two questions: how did the fly manage to wrap under – what appeared to be – a previous wrap… and more importantly, why did my line hit the rod?
The problem would happen with or without the wind, so I knew that it was me: something about my stroke.
I’m a right-handed caster, so I reasoned that the fly line was too close to the rod’s plane. The logical solution seemed to be that my back cast needed to go out to the right (away from me… and not more behind me). It’s a decision that I regret to this day.
Although my fly stopped hitting my rod as often, I began to develop a left-to-right curve in my cast. It comes and goes – uninvited. The frustrating part is that it comes, more often than not, during competition. And when the curve doesn’t happen, “the Ralph” materializes: the fly looks like it’s going to hit the target, and then without warning, the fly jumps to the right.
As I strive for better scores, I have decided that “the curve” and “the Ralph” must go. But, eliminating them has not been easy. First, it took a long time to figure out what was causing these two issues. And then, as any fly caster knows, bad habits don’t die easily.
At the beginning of Part 1, I implied that an imperfect loop was only created by a path of a rod tip that was not straight. Believe it or not, problematic loops can also be created by a rod tip path that is straight.
What I didn’t realize back then, is that the hunch in my shoulders caused my back cast to be thrown slightly to my right away from me.
When the fly line is cast behind me slightly angled off to my right side in a straight line, and I come forward straight ahead, the path of the rod tip and the fly line are not aligned. See Figure 1. This arrangement is like a change in direction of the rod tip. It’s as if the rod tip had been travelling straight and slightly to the left (along the fly line), and then suddenly, the rod tip starts accelerating straight ahead. See Figure 2.
When the rod tip accelerates straight ahead, the force pulls the entire fly line towards the rod tip. The direction of the force creates a lateral vector directed towards the caster. In other words, the end of the line is pulled, not only straight ahead, but also to the left. See Figure 3 and 4a.
Since the fly line doesn’t hit the fly rod every time, a perfect storm needs to form. If the misalignment of the back cast and the direction of the forward cast is small, it’s easier to get the entire fly line to travel straight ahead. But, if the power stroke ends, leaving a short portion of the end of the fly line still misaligned, the likelihood of the fly line hitting the rod are significantly higher. In this situation, due to inertia, the end of the line drifts across the plane of the rod as the entire fly line hurtles forward. See Figure 4b.
If a short length of the end of the fly line (perhaps just the leader) floats across the plane of the rod without hitting the rod, a section of line with low mass may end up to the left of the target direction. And as the fly line unrolls towards the target, the last remaining parts of the fly line will be pulled towards the heavier loop, and the fly will appear to jump to the right of the target: “the Ralph”.
When the line starts even farther off to the side, the same problem manifests in a slightly different way. Since the fly line is farther away from the target line, when the power stroke ends, less of the fly line is travelling in line with the rod tip. Now, the portion of the fly line travelling to the left is much longer.
In contrast to the previous scenario, the mass of the line not aligned with the rod tip is much greater. It is also farther away from the rod. As a result, it takes longer for the line to drift across the plane of the rod. When “the curve” happens, the line typically drifts across the plane of the rod in front of the rod (closer to the target). And due to the large mass of the line to the left of the fly leg of the line, when it turns over, the end of the fly line turns over to the right more gently… gradually curving to the right.
In retrospect, I think that “the curve” happens during competition because I am casting the fly line behind me even more to my right than in practice: I am tightening up, exaggerating my shoulder hunch. I also wonder whether the rod tip travels slightly to the left as the rod comes forward initially (due to the loading of the rod tip and/or my stroke).
Currently, I am working on casting the line back (and forth) as close as possible to the target line. My line doesn’t hit the rod because the vertical movement of the tip at the end of the forward and back casts allow the line to clear the tip. And when I am casting well, my fly lands near the center of the target more reliably and more consistently than ever before.
But, my fly still jumps to the right more often than I would like…. My solace is that I know what happened, and that somehow (SOMEHOW), it is Ralph’s fault. As I wrote earlier, bad habits don’t die easily.
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