David Siskind | Sunday, 27 April 2025
I returned to my practice after a couple of weeks hiatus while recklessly sampling life in NYC and found myself addressing a persistent irritant - a good looking loop formation with a falling (fallen) fly-leg that at the end of the cast rises upward, rolling over weakly. It seems a little different from the tails derived from a concave tip path in that it doesn’t tie knots, so I call it a ‘lazy tail.’ Typically it goes away when I wait a little longer to begin my forward stroke but not always. I considered filming it but first just opened up my stance so I could watch the backcast. I’m not sure why I hadn’t seen this before but I believe that I have never really grooved my backcast. It has been weak even when applying significant effort.
Paul has said to wait on the backcast for the fly to “ring the bell,” hanging in the air. I watched - often no hang, instead a sag while rolling out. During that sag the tension felt at the rod grip decreases so I start forward. The unrolling line tip then kicks downward traveling forward below the rod-leg all the way to the target. The formed loop looks fine until it approaches the target, at which point it starts to climb. So I set a goal of eliminating rod-leg sag. I envisioned an ideal rod-leg behavior - straight, slow settling, no middle-sag, no waves and began to watch the rod-leg going forward and backward, trying to achieve the ideal shape.
Watching the rod-leg with focus, from loop formation all the way to the target, has been eye opening. Practicing with this ideal in mind is tuning my strokes in all directions. It looks to me that regardless of the position of the fly-leg initially (right or left of the rod-leg) eventually it is pulled into alignment with the rod-leg. The rod-leg bosses the fly-leg. In addition to being true it has uses such as addressing changes of target direction. I know it seems obvious (Graeme Hird among others has written about this extensively) but I have always been obsessed with fly-leg momentum.
So for a few days, I’ve been practicing and experimenting with RLA (rod-leg awareness). My backcasts definitely have more authority even with substantial carry. They hover, sort-of, so I can wait the extra beat before moving forward and can eliminate my lazy tails in practice. I’ve applied this to my entire repertoire of target, distance, presentation casts including snakehead casts to good effect.
I do, however, hope and expect that the stroke-solutions, narrowing the differences between expected and actual trajectories as traced by the path of the rod-leg, will become second nature and I’ll be able to cast to tactical fishing targets without obsessive forced focus. I’m going to give this a try for as long as it seems useful.
David Siskind