Gary...
YES !
With casters who don't have a decent loading move, I've found that teaching them to make good back casts by picking up from the water repeatedly at different distances without making a surface commotion helps get the point across. This information and muscle memory is then translated into the forward stroke.
Some students get the point of the loading move by using Joan Wulff's, "form".........a series of PVC pipes placed on the ground before the student illustrating the arc of the loading move and that of the final power snap.
The caster moves the rod in the horizontal plane over these forms which serve as delimiting points, easily seen.
Her video / DVD depicts this.
Hands-on technique can help a great deal, here, too.
Lets see of some of the others have suggestions, too. Gordy
From: gladesflybum@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: hillshead@xxxxxxx ("Gordon Hill")
Subject: Whats in your Bag of Tricks for helping tip casters?
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 18:41:17 -0500
Gordy,
I have a wonderful student: he studies, practices and is highly motivated. He has progressed rapidly (caught a bonefish on fly!). I started him with horizontal casting between parallel ropes to ingrain his "feel" for loop formation. While his loops are now decent, he has poor application of power and does not load the whole rod during his stroke, instead he repositions his rod and relies on an aggressive speed up and stop. Its beyond creep. His line, while having a OK loop , show a distinct "step" in the rod leg. Which suggests to me he does load the rod at first, but fails to continue to accelerate, then repostions and uses an obvious snap to finish the cast. Exectedly, he has difficulty achieving more than modest distance. To compound his problem, he was practicing with a particular 9wt that has an unusually stout butt.
I've convinced him to practice with a much softer 6wt. During our last session I put a slow older rod in his hand when working on smoothing out his stroke, hoping to get the load futher down the rod, but the light has not gone off in his head. Demo's, explanation, and "going for a ride" have not done the trick. He gets the idea, but can't put it to practice. We are both getting frustrated.
Do you, or any of the others, have any special techniques that can help me do a better job of explaining how to load the rod? Can you suggest other avenues to get him to feel and get the whole rod loading?
Thanks in advance.
Gary Meyer
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