I am often asked in my fly fishing lessons, “How far do I cast?” Basically, I like to cast only far enough to keep from scaring the fish. Excessively long cast may rob me of accuracy, delicacy, drag control and even strike control. In some high gradient trout streams in the Smokies a cast over 15 feet long may allow so much line to fall on the stream that it is very difficult to get a drag free dry fly drift.
I’ve conducted this in the choppy white water on the Madison River in MT when I am trying to drift my nymphs right along the streambottom. I have never seen my fishing partner, a fine nymph fisherman, make a cast over 20 feet long.
Charlie Waterman alerted me to an easy way to catch large trout on the Yellowstone River below Livingston. This tactic is to fish the upstream corner of the large pools with a streamer while staying close to the river bank. Do this before wading into the main part of the river to fish the heavy riffle and the deep pools. This tactic alone has given me many large trout over the last ten years.
Extremely Short Cast
Then there was the “Flying Brown Trout” that lived under a large rosebush on a stream in Pennsylvania. The bush drooped down to the water all around it. This made it impossible to cast to this trout even when I saw him rising. Finally I decided to crawl in close to the rosebush on the downstream side of the trout. By allowing my size 14 Cricket to hang down a foot below my rod tip, I was able get between the limbs so my cricket was directly over the trout. As I prepared to lower my fly down the trout jumped up and took the cricket while it was 4 inches above the water. I landed him carefully and released him back under his rosebush. I caught this brown several more times that summer. Each time he jumped to take the fly before it dropped to the stream.
William Downey used a very effective technique of allowing an Inchworm to drop down from the rod tip on only 6 feet of leader to undercut streambanks. I saw him catch some very large trout using this technique on heavily fished streams in Pennsylvania and New York.
My pendulum cast gives me many large trout. I use only the leader and several feet of line to swing a dry fly onto a feeding station in the middle of heavy fast runs on mountain streams. The goal is to allow only the fly and several inches of leader to drift on the stream. As you can see there are often many advantages in using short casts when fly fishing. How short is too short? The fish will let you know!