Please scroll down to read an exerpt from Water Marks.  

The Dastardly Creep and Jab
yet another way to cast a tailing loop

Jim McLennan
originally published in Fly Fisherman Magazine

            Golfers have the slice and fly-casters have the tailing loop.  Both are problems that will drive you crazy if you don’t fix them.  The tailing loop is encountered by nearly all fly fishers, and in order to continue development as a caster it must be eliminated.

                

              We call it a tailing loop when the top piece of fly line drops beneath the bottom piece just before the flyline straightens completely. It can happen on the backcast and during false-casting but is most common on the final forward (delivery) cast.  The immediate problem with tailing loops is that they create tangles and knots in the leader, forcing you to stop fishing while you unravel yet another terminal tackle mess.  The bigger-picture problem is that tailing loops reduce casting accuracy and consistency and limit the distance at which you can deliver a fly properly.

  The tailing loop is a casting disease, and as is true with most diseases, the afflicted person usually knows he’s got something but might not know what.  He’s abundantly aware of the symptoms, but has no idea about the cause or the cure.

  There are numerous causes of tailing loops, many of which have been identified and addressed by casting gurus like Joan Wulff, Mel Krieger, Lefty Kreh and others in these pages and elsewhere.  Beginning the forward cast suddenly, separating the backcast and forward cast by less than 180 degrees, and tracing a concave path with the rod tip will all do it.

               But let me introduce you to my favourite, the Creep and Jab.  It is demonstrated by a great many intermediate-level casters, most of whom don’t realize they’re doing it.

               Here’s how it works. After the backcast there is supposed to be a pause while the line straightens out behind.  During this pause the rod hand should be stationary – that is, not moving.   But instead of pausing, many casters begin to creep forward slowly with their rod hand immediately after making the backcast. Then when the line is straight behind and it’s time to begin the forward cast, there isn’t enough “stroke space” left to make a proper forward cast.   The caster subconsciously realizes this and compensates by beginning the forward cast suddenly, turning it into a jab. This makes the rod tip jump down suddenly, tracing a concave path, and presto, a tailing loop appears. It’s a straight equation: if you creep you have to jab, and if you jab you get a tailing loop. So to fix the problem you have to eliminate the creep.

               The first step is to determine if you’re creeping.  It’s hard to trust your own judgment here (“of course I’m not creeping,” you say) so you should either ask a friend to watch you cast or record your own casting with a video camera.  (Many digital still cameras have the ability to shoot short video segments.) The camera or the friend should ignore the line and focus on your casting hand.  If the pause after the backcast is anything less than a true pause (according to my dictionary a pause is “a temporary stop or rest”), the diagnosis is complete, and the news is not good.

                 The trick to curing Creep and Jab is eliminating the muscle memory that makes your casting hand creep, replacing it with new, correct muscle memory. 

                  First, don’t try to fix this or any casting problem while you’re fishing.  Strange as it sounds, the presence of fish is one of the strongest impediments to casting practice or improvement.  Instead do it on grass.  Go to an open area and make a series of backcasts only. Make one backcast and let the fly line land on the ground behind you.  Then turn and face the opposite direction and make another backcast only. Repeat this a few times, being sure that you pause completely after each cast.  You might get dizzy doing this, but it will also help you get rid of the creep.

                  Once you’re convinced that you’ve eliminated the creep while making backcasts only, do some false casting and watch your casting hand.  Then make some delivery casts.  The final step is to have a friend watch or video you when you’re fishing and not thinking about casting.  You should expect some backsliding at this point, so be prepared to continue the therapy periodically until the checkups show that you’re cured once and for all.

 By eliminating the creep we eliminate the jab, and the result is a smooth casting stroke that creates perfect loops at any distance.

To view the video version of this story, click here

An exerpt from Water Marks

A Kid No More

by Jim McLennan


            Perhaps because she’s an only child, my daughter has been subjected to an excessive
 amount of urging into a lifestyle of fishing and hunting. When she was born our friends made all the usual jokes, asking when she’d get her first fly rod and what size waders she needed. The friends laughed, but I didn’t, probably because it was closer to the truth than anybody realized. Above my desk is a snapshot of a 5 month-old baby sitting on her mother’s knee.  Her mother is wearing waders and a fishing hat, and is sitting in a driftboat. This was not our daughter’s first float trip; it was her first post natal float trip.  

We showed Deanna how to cast with a Snoopy rod and reel in the backyard when she was about four, and shortly thereafter she began reeling in fish that Lynda or I hooked at a small pond near home. Eventually she learned to stop cranking the reel before the rod-tip poked the fish on the forehead. When she was seven or eight she entered the difficult stage when kids want to use a fly rod like their parents, but aren’t yet strong enough to cast with a fly rod.  We maneuvered our way through this period by appointing her as our team’s official fish-netter and fish-releaser, which she viewed as important jobs, and which satisfied her, more or less, until she was able to handle a fly rod on her own.

           She caught her first fish with a fly rod on a rainy float trip in British Columbia when she was nine years old, and I recall clearly a few years later watching her hook, land, and release a number of westslope cutthroats from a side channel on the Elk River. A couple of years after that she stalked, hooked and landed her first big Bow River rainbow on a dry fly.

           Deanna was learning things through these years, but I was too. Most important for me was the realization that it would be very easy to push too hard.  Though inside I hoped she’d become the next Joan Wulff, or the first female guide on the Bow River, or at least would marry a guy who fished with dry flies and hunted with pointing dogs, I sensed that I could drive my daughter away from fishing and hunting if I forced them upon her. Quite early I learned that every session of fishing should be accompanied by equal time for rock-throwing or bug-watching, and in some ways that hasn’t changed much. 

Last summer, when she was 16, we went on a father-and-daughter fishing trip. For two days we hiked along a brown trout stream that flows through a friend’s land in the western Alberta foothills. Fishing was - well, fishing. There wasn’t much activity except for a brief, but stellar episode with a good-sized brown trout and some pale morning duns. It took place at a shady bend in the stream where we could see the fish in the water.  The fish was holding just under the surface beside a fallen spruce tree and was taking every bug that drifted over. On the third cast Deanna’s fly dropped just behind the trout. The fish must have heard the fly land, for it made an immediate pirouette and began to home in, coming right toward us. When the fish opened its mouth to take the fly, it was about 15 feet away, and we could see right down into its white gullet. We landed, photographed, and released the fish, and giggled about the dramatic way it came to the fly. 

When we got home Deanna told her mother that we’d had a great time on our trip, that our friend’s cabin on the creek was really neat, and that she really liked watching the beaver and the frog (“What beaver? What frog?” I thought).  Then, not quite as an afterthought, but in obvious deference to her father, she added “and the fishing was pretty good too.”

I have a theory about obsession: that its existence can be confirmed by the frequency with which you think about something when you’re not doing it.  By this definition, I’m obsessed with hunting and fishing. Deanna is not. She likes them, she is quite skilled at them, but her life doesn’t revolve around them. If she is obsessed, it is with other things, some which might come from her parents  – like her love of music and words, for instance – and others, like her passion for dance, which seem to have spontaneously appeared from the air.  I have learned not to be disappointed with this.  I have accepted the possibility, remote as it seems, that these other things could be as fascinating and rewarding and worthwhile to other people as fishing and hunting are to me.

Through most of her youth Deanna seemed pretty content to hang out with her parents. We probably did an unusual number of activities together, of both a sporting and non-sporting nature. But late last summer when we were planning a family fishing holiday to the Missouri River in Montana, Deanna began to feel life’s pull toward other things. There was discussion about whether she would come with us or stay home and spend time with her friends. In the end we convinced her to come, and the trip was a success, but Lynda and I got the distinct sense that the next decision about her participation in such a trip would not be not be ours to make.

We have reached the point where my ability to stir a passion within my daughter for hunting and fishing (and likely for anything else) has ceased.  If it isn’t in there now, it’s too late to put it in. Her future interest in and pursuit of these things are beyond my control.  A friend wise in these matters once told me that all we can do is introduce our kids to fishing and shooting when they’re young, and then let them live their lives.  We shouldn’t be surprised if they leave these sports behind while they’re focused on schooling, careers, and spouses.  But if they were introduced to field sports early, they are likely to come back to them someday, and they might bring our grandchildren with them when they do.

This fall we arranged for Deanna to skip an afternoon of school so she could go bird hunting with me.  She missed a great chance at a cock pheasant because she forgot to take the safety off, and on the way back to the car we startled a huge mule deer buck at close range.  On the drive home, after I’d teased her sufficiently about missing the pheasant, she said, “There’s always interesting stuff going on out here, isn’t there?” 

            I think she’ll be all right.