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How I Fish: Lefty Kreh

by Pursuit | Aug 1, 2022 | Fishing, Inside Pursuit

One of the greatest flyfishermen of all time shares his angling wisdom, talks about his favorite fishing spots and fish to chase on the fly, and explains his four principles of fly casting

Lefty Kreh, one of the most accomplished and beloved flyfishermen of all time, died in 2018. He was 93 years old. Kreh was a prolific author and globe-trotting angler. Among his many accolades, Kreh was the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sportfishing Association and a member of the IGFA Hall of Fame and Flyfishing Hall of Fame. He was also a wonderful person—kind, warm, funny, and always happy to teach others. Field & Stream’s legendary fishing editor John Merwin once wrote of Kreh: “If America can claim a national flyfishing treasure, Lefty is it.”

Here, we’re reprinting an interview Kreh gave the magazine back in 2009. His stories, humor, and fishing tips are timeless—just like the man himself.

I’ve been fishing since I was old enough to walk to the Monocacy River, near Frederick, Md. My father died when I was young, during the Depression, and my mother had to raise four children. I was the oldest, at 6. We were so poor that we had to live on welfare. I’d catch catfish on bait and sell them so I could buy clothes and food to get through high school.

After World War II, I started fly casting when I got back from Europe. (Lefty fought in the Battle of the Bulge in 1945). Back then, I got a job at the Biological Warfare Center, where we grew and concentrated the bacteria that the scientists worked on. I was one of three people who got anthrax—on my hand and arm. My full name is Bernard Victor Kreh, and there is now a BVK strain of anthrax. I was doing shift work, and I’d hunt or fish between shifts. I started to get a reputation as a hotshot bass fisherman.

Joe Brooks, the fishing writer, lived in the Baltimore suburbs, and he was writing a column in the county paper. He came down with a fly rod one day. This was in September 1947. A big hatch of flying ants was trying to fly across the river, and millions of them were falling into the water. I’m using a 6-pound-test braided silk line, and Joe pulls out this fly line that looked like a piece of rope and swished it back and forth. There were rings out there—he was using a Black Ghost streamer—and he dropped this damn thing in a ring, and boom, he had a fish. He caught almost as many bass as I did, and you don’t normally do that to a guy on his own river.

The next day I drove to Baltimore in my Model A Ford and met him, and we went down to Tochterman’s Sporting Goods—it’s still there, third generation—where he picked out a South Bend fiberglass rod, a Medalist reel, and a Cortland fly line. We went out in the park, and he gave me a casting lesson. Of course, he was teaching that 9 o’clock to 1 o’clock stuff, like everyone was.

My favorite fish to flyfish for are bonefish, absolutely. In freshwater, I like smallmouth bass and then peacock bass.

The longer you swim the fly, the more fish you catch. Gradually I evolved the method that I now teach, where you bring the rod back way behind you on the cast. This accelerates the line, lets you make longer casts and, in turn, puts more line on the water.

I started fishing for smallmouths on the Potomac, at Lander, which is below Harpers Ferry. The river was full of big smallmouths. It was fabulous fishing.

In the 1950s, I went down to Crisfield on the bay. They had a crab-packing plant there, and at the end of the day they shoved everything they didn’t put into cans off the dock. It was the biggest chum line you’d ever seen. My buddy Tom Cofield and I knew about it, and the bass were all over the place. We were using bucktails with chenille, and the wing kept fouling on the hook. On the way home, I said to Tom, “I’m going to develop a fly that looks like a baitfish, that doesn’t foul in flight, that flushes the water when it comes out into the air and is easy to cast.” That’s how I came up with the Deceiver.

18taDxWw2cwiuZA9MXqo9G — Lefty Kreh got his nickname because he used to do everything left-handed—except write and cast. Chris Crisman

The first magazine story I sold was to Pennsylvania Game News. I got paid $89. We thought it was a fortune! It was on hunting squirrels from a canoe.

I teach four principles rather than a rote method of fly casting. The principles are not mine; they’re based on physics, and you can adapt them to your build. They are: (1) You must get the end of the fly line moving before you can make a back or forward cast; (2) Once the line is moving, the only way to load the rod is to move the casting hand at an ever increasing speed and then bring it to a quick stop; (3) The line will go in the direction the rod tip speeds up and stops—specifically, it goes in the direction that the rod straightens when the rod hand stops; and (4) The longer the distance that the rod travels on the back and forward casting strokes, the less effort that is required to make the cast.

My most memorable flyfishing experience was in New Guinea. There’s a fish there called a New Guinea bass—they spell it N-I-U-G-I-N-I. They are the strongest fish I’ve ever seen in my life.

My three favorite flyfishing spots in the world are Maine for smallmouths, Los Roques off Venezuela for bonefish, and Louisiana for redfish. The marsh near New Orleans is over 20 miles wide and 80 miles long. There’s very light fishing pressure, and it’s absolutely the best redfishing anywhere.

The three most important fly casts are the basic cast —you have to learn to use a full stroke; a roll cast, because you use it for all kinds of things; and the double haul. You need to learn how to double haul.

Up until seven, eight years ago, you couldn’t get into flyfishing if you didn’t have a lot of money. Now we have fabulous rods. If you buy any rod today that costs more than $100, it will probably cast better than the person who buys it.

Written by Jay Cassell for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

How to Catch Big Fish on Giant Streamers

by Pursuit | Jul 7, 2022 | Fishing, Inside Pursuit

When someone says “flyfishing,” what pops into your head? If the answer is the delicate sip of a rising trout, the perfect drift over a soft seam, or total relaxation, I’d call you normal. Then there’s me. Most of the time, I measure a good day of flyfishing by the soreness of my shoulder. That’s because the kind I’ve become obsessed with involves trying to get meaty bugs in front of the biggest fish I possibly can. Throwing flies that can turn the heads of true tanks is a big part of this addiction, but for a full dose of my choice drug, I must have sinking fly lines.

Some may argue that sinking line and flyfishing don’t belong in the same sentence, but not me. When a sinking line yanks taut, it’s pure electricity, and more satisfying to me than a dry-fly take. You can call me crazy, or you can take the lessons I’ve learned catching some of my most memorable “dredge” fish and use them to put more hawgs, toads, and donkeys on the fly than you ever could with traditional fly tactics.

Brown Trout: Gain Weight

I had been using short sink tips to throw trout streamers for years, but when I fished with guide and noted streamer tier Brian Wise in Missouri, I learned that my usual 3- to 5-foot tips just wouldn’t cut it.

Wise prefers a long, fast sink tip regardless of water conditions for two reasons. One is that 99 percent of the time, he’s throwing unweighted streamers because he wants the fly to dart side to side and hang during the retrieve, not jig up and down and sink quickly when paused. More important, he wants to keep it fishing all the way back to the rod tip. A streamer hit on most rivers is going to come in the first few strips off the bank, but browns in the Ozarks’ Norfork River are just as apt to hold on midriver ledges and pockets. Without a long sink tip, the fly would pass far above the heads of these fish; with one, the fly hugs the sloping bottom all the way back to the drift boat.

All day we had worn our shoulders out with only one half-decent brown in the net. It was just about dark on the last leg of our float when out of nowhere—and with only a few strips left before a recast—the black-and-purple Double Deceiver I’d been pulling for hours got viciously plowed by one of the heaviest and prettiest wild browns I’ve ever caught. Since then, you won’t find me ripping streamers for browns without a 15-foot sink tip. And the number of fish I’ve caught well away from the bank by doing so has positively skyrocketed.

Striped Bass: Blown Away

1cKVLyfZdu0q2qaSoGmeEu — Fly: White-and-Chartreuse Peanut Bunker
Line: 30-foot 250-grain sink tip Jim Golden

The wind on New Jersey’s Raritan Bay was cranking that April afternoon and the surface chop was building. We were drifting so fast in my friend Eric Kerber’s skiff that I doubt I could have held bottom with 6 ounces of lead. Yet somehow, Kerber was managing to keep a weighted rubber shad in the zone long enough to occasionally smack one of the stripers we were marking 15 feet down. All I wanted to do was get a fly in front of one.

Heavy sink tips generally stink to cast, but in a stiff wind they do have an advantage because they have some punch power. My only hope was to use the wind to my benefit.

Instead of casting behind the boat into the wind, I wound up and laid as much line as I could straight toward the bow with the wind. By the time my hands were in stripping position, the line was sweeping past the boat. I let it straighten behind the boat for just a moment before I began stripping. I don’t think I moved the fly 10 feet before a fish big enough to put me in the backing took a shot. The 22-pounder that delivered the blow remains one of my top three heaviest fly stripers.

For the rest of the tide, every time we marked fish, I either connected or got bumped. Kerber would only hit with his shad every couple of drifts. My takeaway: It’s always worth trying the fly even in terrible conditions, because every once in a while, there will be something about the presentation that turns the fish on more than anything else.

Jack Crevalle: Reel Power

5IgdzQy6acUEMqAkSaiMoM — Fly: White-and-Chartreuse Deceiver
Line: 30-foot clear intermediate sink tip Jim Golden

Jack crevalle don’t get as much respect as they should. They are one of the hardest fighters in the ocean—and the closest you can get to a giant trevally without a ridiculously long flight. For anglers looking to put meat in the box, they don’t hold much appeal; for a flyfisherman wanting to see lots and lots of backing, they’re a dream.

On a trip to Mississippi, guide Sonny Schindler and I had chased wolf packs of jacks busting mullet around Cat Island all afternoon, but every time we got in range, the fish would vamoose. At last, we managed to creep up on a school that had pinned bait against a grass bank. My Deceiver sunk just out of sight, I stripped twice, and I was into my backing before I could even say, “I’m on.” That’s when I realized I’d made a very stupid mistake.

Although I had brought a large-diameter reel, it didn’t have a large arbor. A sink tip of any weight always increases slack in your line, as it creates a belly. That means you have to work a little harder to keep a tight line when fighting a fish. When the powerful jack turned and came at me, that standard-arbor reel couldn’t pick up line fast enough for me to stay tight. I don’t think I’ve ever reeled so frantically in my life. Luckily, I had stuck the fish pretty well, and despite a few seconds of completely limp line during the battle, the monster jack made it to the boat 30 minutes later. Had I been using a large arbor, I probably would have cut that fight time in half.

Lake Trout: Peel It Out

5VPq7Mkg6Wiu6GKUCweACi — Fly: Heavy Olive-and-White Flashback Clouser
Line: 30-foot 350-grain sink tip Jim Golden

If you can hack it, one of the best shots at a laker on the fly is in the dead of winter when the fish are feeding close to shore. Even then, the depths are not ideal, but they’re manageable with the right line. That line, of course, would be a heavy-grain (300 to 400) full sink or long sink tip. This is the route I took to secure my first whip-stick laker.

Drifting with guide Frank Campbell over the Niagara Bar on Lake Ontario, I could see the fish holding around humps on the sonar. Every time we dropped off the back of this one 25-foot rise, Campbell came tight on a white swimbait. I, on the other hand, was stripping with numb fingertips, puzzled as to why I couldn’t connect. After five passes down the money lane without a touch, I changed up the presentation. I made a long cast, then just started peeling out line as we drifted. I waited long enough to actually feel my fly momentarily hang on the bottom. Then I buried the rod tip in the water and started making slower strips. I only made about five before my first laker nearly took the rod out of my hand.

Even though my fly was probably getting to depth before I altered my approach, my faster strips plus the drifting boat meant that it likely wasn’t staying there long enough. Although feeding line isn’t as sexy as casting it, if you’re going to make the effort to target a deep fish, sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to be sure your fly is staying in its face.

Northern Pike: Drop In (Slightly)

4oAoMHxWHegAW2qe2Co4qU — Fly: 9-inch Articulated Olive-and-Orange Bucktail
Line: 15-foot clear intermediate sink tip Jim Golden

My heaviest pike ever on the fly weighed just north of 15 pounds and came from the Cree River in Saskatchewan. I’ll never forget that charge and take.

On our first day, our guide motored us into a small cove with an island. He told me to cast between the island and a patch of flooded grass about 20 feet away. The water was only 3 feet deep, and after the fly splatted down, I gave my line a few seconds to sink. After a couple strips, a wake of submarine proportions came pushing toward my streamer. I let the bug pause, and then gave it one hard tug. That was the trigger that turned the pike from a submarine to a missile locked on target. I could have surfed the wave it threw when it hit.

You might think that in water so shallow there was no need for a sinking line. To this day, however, I rarely pike fish without one unless I’m committed to using poppers. Letting a slow-sinking intermediate tip fall for just a few seconds creates a slight belly in the line. On the first strip, bulkier flies will dive, following the arc of that belly. I’ve come to believe that when you’re casting to a small zone, getting a larger fly to the fish’s eye level as fast as possible equals more strikes.

Largemouth Bass: Muskie Meal Plan

5fb8iLHVFSYS4AEGqEoq82 — Fly: 12-inch Articulated White Bucktail
Line: 30-foot 300-grain sink tip Jim Golden

For someone so obsessed with chucking monster streamers, you’d think I’d have several muskies under my belt. I have zero, but that’s certainly not for a lack of trying. Ironically, the most notable catch I’ve ever had while targeting muskies was a largemouth bass.

By the fourth day of a muskie quest in the St. Paul suburbs last October with my friend Robert Hawkins, my arms were like Jell‑O. All we had to show for the effort were a few pike. Then, as my giant fly sank along a lily-pad edge, I made one strip and saw it disappear. The hit was so violent we were sure I’d finally tied into a muskie. When the fish surfaced I couldn’t believe it—there was a solid 7-pound largemouth with the 12-inch streamer in its jaw.

After the laughter subsided, I realized what I’d done was no different than what trophy bass hunters throwing big trout-imitating swimbaits have been doing for decades. While hair bugs, bunny leeches, and sliders are the patterns most anglers associate with largemouth bass fishing, you might consider taking a big piece of muskie meat to the bass pond. You’re probably not going to get a lot of bites, but they will likely be the right bites when you get them.

Written by Joe Cermele for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

A Father-Son Flyfishing Trip In Montana

by Pursuit | Jul 7, 2022 | Fishing, Inside Pursuit

I’m gonna ferry across the river,” my guide said. “Some pocket water I want you to hit.”

“Sounds good,” I replied.

I gazed downstream. Montana’s Bighorn River is big water, but it was flowing higher than usual, and I hadn’t seen much of what I’d call “pocket water” yet. But I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut. It was too early in the float to question the guide. What I did see, however, was a dark gravel bar rising under the drift boat and a plume of water pouring over the ledge into a deep green hole the size of my front yard. I didn’t want to scuttle the guide’s float plan, but I wasn’t going to pass up a giant fishy-looking lair either.

I cast a white articulated fly my guide had handed me earlier, and dropped it into the billowing pillow of water above the gravel bar. The leechlike blob rode the flow like a kid on a pool slide—I could see why he called his creation the Wet Sock—but the second it sank to the green abyss below, a fish hit and bent the rod. Not bad when the first fish of the day is a Bighorn brown trout just a smidge over 16 inches.

“Heck yeah, man!” my guide hollered. “I’ve been thinking about that pocket ever since we put in.”

That’s when I nearly stuck my foot in my mouth. You call that pocket water? I thought. But the guide was my son, Jack, and we had gone a first hour without a fish—and to be honest, neither of us were sure how this day trip was going to pan out.

Jack had just spent a week at Sweetwater Guide School, a hands-on, dawn-to-dark boot camp for aspiring guides. It was his high-school graduation gift—learning how to row a drift boat and field-fix a jet outboard and calm down cranky anglers. Jack had fallen in love with flyfishing when he was 14 years old, wading Montana’s Gallatin River. Over the next few years, he pelted guides with relentless questioning from Maine to the Florida Keys. One June, on Idaho’s South Fork of the Snake River, he heard that college students worked Western rivers over their summer breaks, shuttling boats and guiding. That was the end of his future as a summer lawn-care consultant. With his Sweetwater course now over, he’d bummed a drift boat from an instructor, and I was his first real client.

“Thank you, Lord,” Jack said. “I’m not going to lie to you, Daddy. I was getting pretty nervous until you caught that fish.”

“You’re not the only one, son,” I said. “And we need to talk about your idea of pocket water.”

Wild West

When Jack walked out from under the tall Bighorn cottonwoods at the Sweetwater school base camp, I hadn’t seen him for a week, but I could tell from his loping gait that Montana had changed him—that a week on the river had given him passage of a sort that he could not yet understand but that I could not deny. He’d been bitten by the West, and wherever his river would run in the future, it would run far from home for at least a portion of his life. This is the cruel contract of parenthood: Give them roots and wings, then pray that the former hold as your child spreads the latter in relentless freedom.

With the monkey off our backs, we settled in for perhaps the finest afternoon of fishing I’ve ever had. Jack held me in the current seam as I worked the fly all the way down the gravel bar, cast by cast. We caught fish at Grey Cliffs and Suck Hole and Mike’s Cabin, and we whooped it up with every strike. Did you see that? Holy cow, man, did you see that?

Jack spoke of these places like he might describe the local parks up the street back home. He was fully immersed in the magic of Montana, the fish and the river and the wild country, as the wild dreams of a 14-year-old were coming true right in front of him.

It was just one of those days that leaves you shaking your head and checking your heart. We all get them occasionally, moments in the field when you know that this is one you will carry to your grave. The fish were biting like crazy, yes, and their runs seemed stronger and their spots more finely chiseled than ever in the Bighorn light. But more than the fishing, it was the first day that we’d floated as equals, and the sadness that came with the loss of my little boy was baptized in the gratitude that from this day forward, I would fish and hunt with this man in the boat.

Big Finish

By midafternoon, we didn’t have much longer to fish. Soon Jack would have to hit the oars hard; we had a six-hour drive to Missoula still ahead of us. But then he slowed the boat one last time.

“I want you to hit that log,” he said. “See it?”

“I think so.” It was a giant sculpture of twisted driftwood, 8 feet tall, at least. Who could miss it? But as my mouth opened for a wisecrack, my guide tucked me into range. My first cast brought a ferocious slash from the largest trout we’d seen all day, but the heavy water carried the drift boat too swiftly for a second crack.

Jack slipped overboard and pulled the drift boat 30 feet upcurrent. “I’ll hold the boat,” he said. “You just catch the fish.”

We pulled two more fish from the hole, the second one running wild like a puppy in the yard. The water likely spent, Jack pulled himself back in the boat, rowed clear of the swift current, then stowed the oars and leaned back, soaking in the sun, the moment, the river, and his future, which unfurled just about as far as the next bend in the Bighorn. If there is a finer thing than to be 17 years old on a Montana river, I can only barely imagine what that might be.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” he said, kicking his Chaco-clad feet on the cooler. He grinned over a grimy sun buff and stroked a 15-day-old beard that I could actually make out in the right slant of sunlight. “I’m thinking of keeping the ’stache, at least. Think I can pull it off?”

I started to taste my foot again, but caught myself in time. I reckon if there’s anywhere in this world that a young man can still dream, it’s Montana.

Written by T. Edward Nickens for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

Carpe Diem! Flyfishing for Carp with Mulberry Flies

by Pursuit | Jun 2, 2022 | Fishing, Inside Pursuit

Carp are total jerks. Stalk them on the flats or in a clear river when they’re feeding on forage, like nymphs and crayfish, and they’ll snub your bugs, spook when you cast, and drive you to the brink of rod-snapping madness. Or you can look for some under a mulberry tree, where they’ll feed with the same carefree vigor as a school of farm-pond bluegills. Depending on where you live, mulberry trees fruit from May through August, and if there are branches overhanging a river, rest assured every single carp in the area knows where to find them. As the breeze shakes berries off the tree, the carp swarm, and they can get so focused on gulping the juicy morsels off the surface that they’ll let their normally expletive-inducing guard down. This is your chance to nail a golden giant on the fly. Here’s how.

It’s a Breeze

Wind is no friend of the fly-caster, but in the mulberry game, it can be your best buddy; the more berries hitting the water, the more frenzied the carp get. On days with a stiff breeze, I’ve witnessed dozens of carp lining up downstream of a tree like surface-feeding trout, moving in for a berry, then sliding to the back of the line to set up again. Of course, if there’s not a breath of wind, I may or may not have purposely snagged a tree a time or two just to give the branches a little shake and get the party started.

Sound Off

The plop of a mulberry hitting the water is what draws distant carp to the tree, and if your fly doesn’t closely match the surface-smacking tone of a natural berry, it can get refused—especially if the feeding activity isn’t hot and heavy. Carry foam berry flies with different densities—some cut from thick foam, others made of trimmed foam strips—so you can dial in the right notes. Color matters as well, so bring flies in a range from dark purple through bright red to match the current ripeness of the berries.

Short Lead

Usually when you’re flyfishing for carp, you want to lead the fish by a good distance, giving it time to find the fly on its own. But with mulberry flies, you want to practically hit the carp in the face. These fish have poor eyesight, so they’ll hear a berry, rise to sip it, and then drop back down. So pick a fish that’s moving toward the tree and plop your fly a foot in front of its snout. Most of the time that fish will strike; if it doesn’t, don’t expect it to follow your fly. Just strip in and be ready to cast at the next target.

Written by Joe Cermele for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

Learning to Fly Cast from an Angling Icon

by Pursuit | May 2, 2022 | Fishing, Inside Pursuit

After an injury stymies the author's fly-casting skills, he revisits lessons from the late, great Lefty Kreh and finds his stroke again.

I was recuperating from a broken wrist, which I suffered on a Montana trout fishing trip when my horse bucked as it stepped on a rattlesnake that had been mauled by a bear. In other words, I tripped on a rock while hiking back to my car and cracked the sesamoidal pisiform of my wrist. Right there at the triquetral joint. Ugh.

I knew I’d have to modify my fly-casting stroke while I regained strength and range of motion, and it so happened that I was working on a tribute to Bernard “Lefty” Kreh, the legendary flyfishing angler and instructor who had passed away just a few months earlier. Watching YouTube videos of Lefty casting was a revelation. At more than 80 years old, the man could cast 80 feet of fly line with all the drama of opening a can of soda. As I pecked away, one-handed, on my story, I thought: If I have to relearn a little, maybe I should start at the beginning.

After all, I’d been thinking about the mechanics of my fly casting for a while. For years, I had been using a Kreh-like total-body casting stroke, but as I threw ever-heavier lines with ever-heavier rods, all sorts of unnecessary gesticulations crept into my style. I had begun raising my casting arm to squeeze more rotation from the shoulder. I would punch the rod forward like I was taking an angry swing. I could sense that my casting was getting out of hand, and then I had a chat with Flip Pallot, the second most famous flyfisherman of all time. He told me that in 1964, when he was already a hotshot South Florida flyfishing guide, he saw Lefty cast an entire fly line with his bare hands. “I knew right then,” Pallot told me, “that I might know how to catch fish on a fly, but I didn’t know shit about fly casting.”

It was, most likely, the only time that Pallot and I will ever feel the same way about our casting skill. It was time to go back to school.

Casting Calls

Over the next few weeks, I propped my laptop on a chair in the backyard, pulled out a rod, and let virtual Lefty reteach me how to cast. He espoused what he called the Four Principles of Fly Casting. Like gravity, they could be neither altered nor ignored. Most are standard fare among casting instructors: The fly must be moving before you begin the backcast. Don’t bend your wrist, or you’ll waste a cast’s energy by throwing the line in a curve. The line will continue in the direction where the rod tip stops.

But it was Lefty’s “head to toe” casting style that set him apart from many. He eschewed the metronomic 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock cadence that most fly casters first learn. From the shade of my pecan tree, the World War II veteran dismissed this as “saluting.”

“What are you, a windshield wiper?” YouTube Lefty asked. “In no other sport do you only use your hand and arm. From Frisbee to ping-pong, you use your whole body.”

For Lefty, the perfect fly cast started at the ankles, knees, and waist as he twisted 45 degree away from the target and brought his casting arm behind his shoulder. He waited for the fly line to flatten out behind him, then he'd reverse courdse, with a smooth forward cast that picked up speed from starts to stomp-on-the-brakes finish.

For Lefty, the perfect fly cast started at the ankles, knees, and waist as he twisted 45 degrees away from the target and brought his casting arm behind his shoulder. He waited for the fly line to flatten out behind him, then he’d reverse course, with a smooth forward cast that picked up speed from start to stomp-on-the-brakes finish.

I mimicked his power stroke, threading the fly line in the open airspace between the back deck and the pecan. I had to raise the rod tip a smidge for the line to clear the neighbor’s fence on the backcast, but I’m sure Lefty understood that I was working in a tight space. But otherwise, he let nothing slide. He admonished my hand position on the cork. “Thumb behind the target!” He called out my snapping strokes. “Accelerate through the stroke! You don’t have to work any harder to cast 60 feet than 20 feet!”

I practiced turning my body toward the backcast and keeping my elbow low. “Don’t ever lift it off the shelf,” Lefty explained as I replayed the clip a dozen times. I started my casts farther back, focusing on a smooth acceleration from start to finish.

“That’s right!” Lefty hollered out, both to me and to some young woman standing by a farm pond on the computer screen. “Casting too hard is how you get wind knots when there ain’t no wind!” We practiced day after day as Lefty admonished me from the bow of a flat skiff in the tropics, from years and decades long past. My wrist began to complain less and less, and my fly line loops tightened.

“You don’t cast a fly line, you unroll it…. A backcast ain’t nothing but a forward cast going the other way…. Get the fly moving!” Lefty barked from the laptop’s tinny speaker.

A month later, laptop Lefty was, unfortunately, nowhere to be found. I motored out of North Carolina’s Beaufort Inlet with a grimace; a 20-knot wind chopped the water into 3-foot waves, each curl capped with white foam. Scattered schools of Spanish mackerel and false albacore popcorned around the tide break, but the fish were up and down so quickly, you’d miss every chance with a four-stroke false cast. I eased upwind of the fish and listened to Lefty’s words in my head. I slowed each cast down. With my arm locked to an imaginary shelf, the cast’s low center of gravity helped keep my feet bolted to the hull. I turned my body toward the backcast, Lefty-style, and smoothly delivered a 40-foot zinger with a single backcast. I practically felt his hand slapping my back.

Then I missed the only solid strike I’d have that morning. I set the hook too early and practically ripped it from a mackerel’s mouth. Flustered, I heaved on the rod for the backcast instead of stripping the fly tight, and pulled a spaghetti wad of gnarled line straight into the hull. I had to laugh. If Lefty were watching, I knew what he’d say. I’d heard it a dozen times before.

“God ain’t gonna let you cast until you get the end of the line moving,” Lefty preached. “He just ain’t.”

So it was back to the basics. Seems like that always works best.

Gear Tips: Hot Rods

It isn’t suitable for every fishing situation, but the Sage Igniter rod series does what it is designed to do with a ferocious punch: deliver heavy lines and heavy flies through strong winds and over long distances. And it’s not just for the salt: A super-fast blank taper and light feel make these rods a potent tool for all-day casting from a drift boat.

Written by chillman for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

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