There are many articles on what your rod and rod tip should do during a cast. In contrast, there aren’t many articles on what your rod and rod tip should do *between* casts. One reason for the paucity of information may be that there is literally nothing to discuss.
Between casts your rod needs to be still – absolutely still. Think seasoned-mind-of-a-meditating-monk still.
To simplify this post, let’s focus on the back cast. From the time that the loop has formed to the time that the front cast should be initiated, the rod should not move. You should not drift backwards as the loop unrolls, and the line should never pull your rod into the top resting position. No. Nuh uh. Nope.
If you move the rod tip backwards as the loop unrolls in the back cast, you create slack. Slack, in turn, *prevents* the rod from loading. How much impact the slack has on the loading of your rod depends on the timing of an ill-advised backwards movement during the back cast.
If your rod slowly drifts backwards shortly after forming the back cast loop, the initial lack of line tension between the rod tip and the loop stops the rod from loading. See Figure 1. Since the mass of the line in the fly leg of the loop is far greater than the mass of the line in the rod leg of the loop, the energy of the fly leg of the loop will start to pull and move the line in the rod leg of the loop. If the line becomes taut with the rod tip, the rod can start to load.
How much energy the back cast loses when removing slack in the line of the rod leg depends on the length and duration of the rod tip movement backwards. An increase in length means the mass of the slack line and the distance it must move to make the line taut grows. An increase in duration means that more line has straightened out, and thus, the mass of the line in the rod leg of the loop grows while the mass in the fly leg shrinks. In either scenario, the energy remaining to load the rod once the line becomes tight to the rod tip is much less.
When the rod tip moves backwards in the late stages of the back cast – when much of the line has straighted out (eg. delayed drift) – slack is formed again. But unlike the earlier scenario, the slack cannot be eliminated immediately for longer casts. The mass of the line in the rod leg of the loop is far greater than the mass of the line in the fly leg of the loop, and the energy remaining in the fly leg will not be enough to move the entire rod leg of the line including the rod tip.
Consequently, a late movement backwards creates two serious problems. First, you lose any energy (rod bend) stored in the rod, and second, the slack that you created must be eliminated during the front cast by a weight shift and/or part of the front stroke. When you fail to load the rod, you are robbing yourself of distance.
Ideally, you want to keep the rod still after you form the back cast loop. If you form a tight loop, the energy of the loop will start to pull the rod tip backwards. The loading of the rod will be small during the initial parts of the back cast, and it will increase as the mass of the line in the rod leg of the loop increases.
Loading of the rod tip is not the same as a backwards movement of the rod by the caster. When the caster moves the rod tip backwards, slack is created. Slack decreases or altogether prevents loading of the rod.
An unloaded rod means that the caster isn’t taking advantage of the energy within the loop as he or she is false casting. Consequently, the caster is exerting a tremendous amount of energy to keep the line aerialized.
When the rod remains still and the rod tip is pulled back by the momentum of the line, it is transferring the line’s energy into the rod. A bent rod will subsequently provide stored energy for the front cast. A still rod between false casts helps to conserve, not only the line’s energy, but also the caster’s stamina. Moreover, a loaded rod allows a caster to come forward with less worry about shocking the rod tip.
In general, any slack that develops after the loop has formed will decrease the loading of the rod. We’ve discussed one source of slack (a backwards movement of the rod as the back cast straightens out), but it can also happen, for example, if the rod tip is not dampened well at the end of a stroke sending waves into the rod leg of the loop as the tip flexes and counter-flexes repeatedly. Slack is slack. Movement of the rod tip after the loop has formed will increase or decrease the loading of the rod depending on whether the slack in the system is decreased or increased by the movement of the rod tip.
If you want to feel the rod loading (and you do because it means that you are doing a lot of things right), you must keep the rod still after forming a tight loop. Once you make a back cast, you need to quickly dampen the rod tip by repositioning the rod. You want to finish dampening and repositioning the rod with as little line forming in the rod leg of the loop – and with little to no slack.
Thank you to Simon (and Luna) for inspiring this post. Thank you, Simon, for visiting the blog. I sincerely hope that this information helps you to improve your fly casting and to enjoy fly fishing even more!