Tag Archives: Guiding

who am I to judge

I wrote this article on double-haul casting and I think I have a lot of nerve to judge these people who have some notoriety. Even though I am classified as a professional fisherman because I teach classes, I have a site that is considered serious enough by people in the industry, I don’t personally believe that I am such an authority that I can hold them to account. At the same time, they say such enormous things with such aplomb that someone has to contradict them.
So I’m nothing, I don’t consider myself a better fisherman than anyone else, and I know better fishermen than me. I’m not a better caster than anyone, but I truly believe that I’ve made the effort to try and understand the dynamics of casting that their arguments and performances in this particular video are far below the quality that can be expected from any ‘professionals’.


I’ve spent a lot of time making videos of spey casts, and overhead casts to say that if I concentrate just a bit in this exercise, I can make ‘clean’ casts, tight loop, perfect alignment, little vertical wobble except the natural ones. I’m not saying that in a fishing situation, all my casts would be this perfect, but in a video shooting, I feel it is necessary to present a quality cast.


I try to convince myself that these anglers are right or that their vast experience allows them to do it their way and as I told my students this summer, the most important thing is to put the fly in the right place and in the best way possible.