Overhang / wind

From Al Crise (in answer to the question of how wind can affect the handling of overhang.)

I did some casting with a short headed line to see just what effect the wind had. So the Wind quit. Just my luck. Here are my thoughts.

The wind from the front will help straighten the line. A cast with a long overhang will cast if you can get the end of the line moving straight before you make the cast. Every one has laid out the line walked it tight and made a full line cast. There was no hinging.

If the wind is from behind you will have a harder time getting the slack out. Hence the cast does not turn over. False casting with 4-6 ft of over hang is about all most casters can do. If you are a good caster you can get more overhang out. Then as soon as the line has any slack due to wind, or bad timing. not enough power, tracking, anything you can think of the Cast falls apart. Many a great cast was destroyed with just a little slack.

So the wind will help you get the line tight from rod tip to fly coming from the back cast if blowing in your face.

Here, on Big Pine Key, we have had winds of 20 to 42 mph for several days, now. I went out and tried casting with different lengths of overhang using an 11 wt. rod loaded with a 10 wt short head line. Steve Rajeff and I were out on the flat, but with the bad weather, no tarpon were showing, so we had time to play with this.

I found that both a strong head wind as well as a strong wind from behind limited the amount of overhang that we could handle. Steve, of course, is a world class caster and could handle a lot more overhang than I could in either direction. He did so with his usual near perfect tracking / SLP coupled with an increased delay in turnover yielding a lightning fast, brief "power snap" , very high loop speed, and a much better stop than I could muster.

As I played with this, I noted just what one might expect: That when casting into the wind in either direction (back cast or forward cast) that I was limited to the amount of overhang I could get handle. When casting with the wind (on either back cast or forward cast ) the wind actually allowed me to use more overhang.

For my best casts into the strong wind with max. overhang, I made false casts with a modest amount of line and very little overhang until my final back cast. On that cast, I took advantage of the wind to shoot line way back which, of course, added a lot of overhang, and then was able to make a much better presentation cast.

I took note of the fact that when casting into the wind in either direction that as the wind exerted its effect of slowing down the unrolling loop or even blowing it back as it unfurled, that there appeared to be a sag in the running line which yielded slack to be taken up on the next stroke, thus shortening the effective stroke length. No video, nothing fancy, just what I observed.

Steve was able to make much better distance than I could without having to resort to that tactic. He had an uncanny sense for knowing just how much overhang he could handle.

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