Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 17 October 2026
In one interesting topic on the board I saw this, “Instructors are keen to deliver a fishing cast because they think the end product is where you start, and majority of students wants it. Shitty spiral!”
But the problem is that they don’t even do that I think. If the start with the pickup of 30’ of line and do some false casting and putting the line down, both the student and the instructor is into a lot of pain. The student won’t see the back cast so everything is shitty, the instructor gets panic and starts to instruct even more. Telling the student to stop bending the wrist. And we have a total shit show. Even worse if the instructor starts to talk about stopping hard and loading the rod.
On the board everyone seems to know and agree upon that rod loading is bogus, a beginner and everyone else needs to see the back cast to learn something and this is best done with side arm casting. And many of those things I did figure out by myself. A big reason for that I believe is that during my first contact with fly fishing I was the least hopeless student in our group so I did receive less instructions. I didn’t have a lot of stupid ideas after that day.
So after that day I went and bought a kit and went fishing. It didn’t take me long to figure out if I did cast on the side things were easier and just focusing on keeping the loops tight things just went better. Tight loops I had picked up as something good on YouTube. But I hadn’t seen anyone put the rod on the side. I felt like a fraud because I wasn’t doing it as I had seen the instructor or the guys on YouTube doing it. Vertical and not watching the back cast. But on that day fishing was more important than being perfect, that shit didn’t work so that had to wait for later.
I did try to make the loop and the casting vertical from time to time. But that didn’t work as well so I kept side arm casting. I got quite decent at it so I kept going. But still thinking it was wrong. Even if it made sense, it kept the line away from the trees and on the safe side from the wind. I was doing a lot of back cast deliveries also. Which I also thought was wrong. If only someone had told me this was the way to do it.
Then much later I found a video of the triangle drill by Lee. So I realised I had been onto something, but I wasn’t doing it as in the video. But I spent time on it and I got better. Knowing that this was good stuff and keeping the line shorter I learned a lot. Learned that the wrist could be very handy in fly casting. Even if I had heard that it should stay stiff. But casting using the wrist was better so I kept using it. Still had a hard time casting vertical, but why bother? This was better.
Other things I did pick up was that “loading the rod” felt very weird. Stopping the rod hard, that was not for me. It just turned the line into a mess. What I did figure out was that thinking of bending the rod as little as possible was much better than “loading it”.
That is how I got started. Testing, discarding the things that didn’t work, getting some inspiration from YouTube. And finding some very confusing things also. Like searching for seatrout and finding some video where Lasse Karlsson was casting ridiculous distance, with what looked like nylon behind his fly line. Ridiculous, I knew that we put Dacron after the fly line and casting like 50 meters cannot be real.
So what is my point here? My idea here is that bad instructions is a very bad feedback loop. The student gets stressed, the instructor gets stressed and tries to fix it with even more instructions. The student goes home with a lot of frustration, a none working fly cast and no idea how to improve. This can also be the reason why so many people have the idea that the double haul is something hard. It is very hard if you don’t have a working back cast, as you have to be able to shoot a bit of line in both directions to get the hauling to work in both directions.
A brief and good instruction with a task and knowledge where the student gets to figure out stuff by themselves and walk away for a bit to take the pressure off is probably a very good idea. Part of this is in the CI study guide. It could just be better. And we as instructors can also be better. A good start is from the stuff Will & Mark talks about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bHC7Uq50sA
I felt quite stupid when Mark told me that I can teach the pick up laydown with a side arm cast also. I was so stuck in how it is shown in every video and other instructions that it simply didn’t exist in my mind. I had figured out that the triangle method is great for teaching the double haul and can work well for the roll cast. But the pick up letdown, nope.
That was some ideas on teaching. And now on to something else. Last Sunday I did my last seatrout session for this year. The fishing was great, my casting was great and a bit adventurous. One cast the wind direction, the boat position, and the direction I wanted to cast in didn’t perfectly line up. But I still went for it hoping for the best. It is good to fish barbless, it makes it easier to pull a fly out from your back in a hard to reach location. Other than that my casting was great. It is interesting to see how the hours of practice improves the fishing. My seatrout fishing is often a combination of distance and precision. I often have to put the fly very close to the shore right at the edge of the seaweeds. I don’t think it is just my casting that has made my fishing great lately. The sessions haven’t been many or long but I have caught what I consider a lot of fish. At least five seatrouts landed in each outing. I even landed one on the last cast of the season, that’s a good ending of the season.
Cheers, Rickard
Pod: I think that’s a rental scooter