Casting with Lefty Kreh

By Lefty Kreh and Jay Nichols

Like taking a private lesson with the best teacher in the world of fishing, this fly-casting guide offers step-by-step instructions to over forty casts.

Casting should be nearly effortless. If you understand fly-casting mechanics and how to adapt them to various fishing conditions, your casting will greatly improve. That has been Lefty’s philosophy since he began teaching fly casting over fifty years ago. Lefty shows how to get rid of a tailing loop, throw a slack-line cast, and roll cast better, as well as casts for tight quarters, in wind, casting with weighted flies and lines, and distance casts. A section on the physical movements explains how to prevent injuries to the rotator cuff and elbow. Whether you fish salt water or streams, heavy rods or light, you'll learn everything from small changes in movements that greatly improve your casting to totally new takes on traditional casts from this book. Lefty is the master, and this book captures his lifetime of wisdom on the subject of casting.

“Lefty Kreh is well known for his quick smile and sharp wit, his encyclopedic knowledge of knots and tackle, his decades of fly-fishing exploration around the globe, and his remarkable prowess with a fly rod, but his greatest gift to fly fishers is his role as a teacher and mentor.” —John Randolph

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781461750758

Book preview

Introduction

The best casters expend very little energy making most casts. Above, Lefty Kreh casts tight loops with a bamboo rod and a large fly.

Good casting is easy. I don’t mean that it comes easily—it doesn’t. It requires a lot of hard work, practice, and time on the water fishing. What I mean is that good casters expend very little effort making most casts. My main goal in this book is to show you how to cast—whether you are young or old, male or female—without exerting any more effort than is necessary. Watching a young, strong caster huff and puff to send a fly line 100 feet doesn’t impress me. What I look for, and take great pleasure in watching, is someone who casts well with as little energy as possible. Cathy Beck, for example, who weighs about 135 pounds and is perhaps 5'4" tall, can often throw the line farther than men twice her size, and with less effort.

The traditional method of fly casting teaches the angler to use mainly the arm and the wrist to make all casts. Most of the casts are made in a vertical plane, where the rod tip moves back and forth between the often-quoted 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock positions. This works fine when casting light lines, rods, and flies at relatively short distances. But when throwing longer casts, especially with heavier rods, lines, and often weighted or air-resistant flies, this method is not only inefficient, it can cause serious physical problems, such as painful tennis elbow or torn rotator cuffs. Since it requires strength, this method also prohibits older anglers and women who don’t have powerful wrists and arms from expanding their horizons into saltwater or bass fishing, which requires heavier tackle and longer casts.

If you watch several of the best baseball hitters, each has a different stance and holds the bat differently when up at the plate. But despite these individual styles, all baseball hitters are captive to certain principles of hitting. To hit a home run, they swing the bat through a long stroke; to bunt, they use a short stroke. It is the same with casting. We, too, are captive to basic principles, and if we don’t adhere to them, our casting and fishing success suffers. I realized in the late 1970s that people are built differently and fishing situations vary, so I stopped teaching the popular method of casting and began to teach basic principles. These are not my principles, they are physics. Once you understand these fundamental fly-casting laws of physics, you can improve your cast, adjust casting strokes to your physical makeup, or adapt them to a specific fishing situation. There is no one way or style of casting simply because anglers are physically different, fishing situations vary, and many kinds of tackle and flies are used. You shouldn’t cast a dry fly the way you would a weighted Clouser Minnow or a sink-tip line. The casting problems on a small trout stream, a big steelhead river, and a windy saltwater flat are so different that a single method or style of fly casting simply won’t work in a variety of situations. Fly fishermen should learn to cast in many ways. Learning to cast one way means you can only fish one way, and you will miss opportunities. I think what is holding back fly fishing more than anything else is the lack of better fly casters. If people could cast better, they would buy more tackle, they would go fishing more often, and they would enjoy the sport more because they would catch more fish.

There is no one way or style of casting simply because anglers are physically different, fishing situations vary, and fly fishers use many kinds of tackle and flies. Above, Dave Whitlock casting on the White River in Arkansas.

All the directions in this book are for right-handers. Points that I consider to be really important are in boxes like this one.

Many of these casts are applicable in a wide variety of situations, so I encourage you to read through the entire book, even if at first a particular chapter doesn’t seem to pertain to you. For instance, even if you are only concerned with casting 50 feet, the chapter on distance casting can help you cast 50 feet more efficiently. If you fish for trout, the chapter on stripping baskets, which many anglers only consider a saltwater tool, might inspire you to try them on trout streams. Some casts that I have organized under casts for weighted flies—the low-side-up cast or curve cast—can also be used with dry flies.

In this book I hope to not only help you improve your fly casting, but also to better understand fly-casting mechanics and how to adapt them to various fishing conditions. I also want to emphasize the importance of learning how to prevent—or cast with—torn rotator cuffs and tennis elbow problems. Conventional methods of fly casting really strain these body parts, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize how important it is to use all of your body to help make the cast. Not only is it easier, but it also prevents harm. I met Dr. George Yu, who is a fly caster and a renowned surgeon, while trying to find a solution to my own rotator cuff problems, which weren’t caused by fly casting, but sure limited my ability to cast at times.

When I first met Dr. Yu, he asked me, How do you sleep?

I replied, Not worth a damn.

He said, "No, I mean how do you sleep?"

Above: Flip Pallot casts incredibly narrow loops to probe under mangroves for snook. Captain Steve Huff poles the boat along a backcountry shoreline in Florida’s 10,000 Island.Below: Bob Clouser works the edge of a Susquehanna River grass bed for smallmouth bass. Casting large bass bugs and streamers all day can be hard work if you do not modify your casting stroke.Cathy Beck’s perfect casting form allows her to cast farther and more efficiently than casters twice her size and strength. Good casters who also fish a lot realize that efficiency is more important than strength.

I told him, I’m telling you, George, not very well.

Let me rephrase that, Yu said, smiling, but also a little impatient. "Before ‘not very well’ how did you sleep?"

Finally, what he was getting at dawned on me. Well, I slept with my hand underneath my head.

Well, Lefty, that’s probably what caused your rotator cuff to tear.

He proceeded to explain to me that when you sleep like that, you stress the rotator cuff over time and partially tear it. At the time, I could not lift my arm 4 or 5 inches without bad pain. Dr. Yu gave me some injections, and by the end of the week, I realized that, for the first time in a long time, I could reach into the cupboard without pain. I had three more treatments, spaced two weeks apart, and I was like new. I had no idea that I could do such damage while sleeping. This is worth looking into if you have similar problems. Dr. Yu is a very busy man, so I am grateful that he took the time to contribute a much needed chapter on the medical point of view of fly casting and rotator cuff problems, which have been a persistent problem in our sport.

The more I learn about certain physical limitations to fly casting, the more interested I have become in trying to solve problems that plague many participants in our sport, or problems that prevent people from participating in our sport. Fly fishing grew in the late sixties in Florida when inventive and resourceful anglers faced conditions for which no previous cast had been developed, so they invented one to catch the fish. When George Harvey needed to sink his nymphs faster and without drag, he invented the tuck cast. Today, our casting repertoire continues to expand as more and more anglers are learning about Spey casting. (Simon Gawesworth and others have produced fine books on the subject, so I have not gone into it here, but I urge you to explore these techniques and continue to grow as casters. Just about every Spey cast with a two-handed rod is equally useful with a one-handed rod.) Fly fishing and fly casting are in constant evolution, and every day we add to what we know.

CHAPTER 1

A Lifetime of Learning

JOE BROOKS

In the late 1940s, I lived in central Maryland and I really didn’t know anyone who fly-fished, except for one man, Sam Gardner, who dapped for brook trout in the tiny mountain streams in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1947, Joe Brooks called me and said that he’d like to write a column about bass fishing on the Potomac. Brooks, who at that time was not nationally known, wrote a weekly outdoor column for a small newspaper called the County Paper in Towson, Maryland. By that time, I had gotten a reputation with some of the better bass fishermen in the area as someone who knew how to catch fish with light plug-casting gear. (Even though spinning reels had been around in different parts of the world for some time, they were just coming into the United States.)

We went to the Potomac River just below Harpers Ferry, and I carried my 13-foot aluminum canoe down to the bank. I went up to get the rest of the gear, and when I came back down, I watched Joe assemble what I would later learn was an Orvis Battenkill fly rod and a GAF line, which was equivalent to a 9-weight line today. Because Harper’s Ferry was at a cut in the mountains, there was always a little bit of a breeze, and that day was no exception.

Joe, if you don’t have a plug rod with you, I have an extra one, I offered. I was fishing with 6-pound braided silk line thin as sewing thread, and Joe had that fly rod with line that looked as big as rope.

What do you mean? he said.

Well, it’s kind of windy, I said. Bear in mind I had never seen a fly caster before.

He said, Would you mind if I used this fly rod?

Not at all, I said, with doubts that it would work very well for him.

As we floated downriver, Joe caught almost as many fish on his fly rod as I did, which really impressed me. I had fished the river for years before and after the war, and I knew it well. After breaking for lunch, Joe walked upstream of a slanted rock ledge that ran parallel to the river, where he began casting to dozens of little rings on the water’s surface. At first, I didn’t think the rising fish were bass—I thought they were minnows. The fish rose, and he dropped the fly right into the ring, and caught a nice smallmouth. I couldn’t believe how accurate and effective he was. He did this about eight times, and I thought: I need to learn more about this. I later learned that every late September and October the Potomac gets a migration of flying ants that attempt to cross the river from Virginia into Maryland. Millions of them fall into the water, causing the bass and other fish to go on a feeding spree.

Joe Brooks fishing for bonefish at Key West, Florida.Joe Brooks holding an 18-pound mutton snapper caught on a fly in Key West.

The next day, I drove to Baltimore to see Joe, and he took me to Tochterman’s Sporting Goods where he helped me pick out a green, 9-weight South Bend fly rod for a GAF line (which today I wouldn’t want to have to cast) and a Pflueger Medalist reel that I still have. He took me over to a park, and he gave me a casting lesson. While he didn’t put a book under my arm to keep my elbow close to my body, which was the way a lot of old timers learned to cast, he taught me the typical 9 o’clock to 1 o’clock stroke. His elbow rose only a little bit and dropped a little bit. Watching how effective Joe was at catching fish with a fly, and his subsequent casting lessons, opened my eyes to a new dimension of fishing.

Casting for smallmouth bass during a blizzard hatch on the Potomac River.

SMALLMOUTH

After my first lesson with Joe, I began experimenting with a fly rod on my own, for my favorite species—smallmouth bass. My stepfather had a boat on the Potomac at Lander, which is about 20 miles south of Harpers Ferry. I’d often fish for smallmouth there. I could get the popping bug or streamer out there alright, but only to distances of about 45 feet. I had already learned from fishing lures that the longer you could swim the fly through the water, or the more targets you could reach, the more bass you were going to catch. I quickly realized that moving your rod from 9 o’clock to 1 o’clock wasn’t the best way to cast these larger flies long distances, and I gradually started to cast more toward the side and extend my arm farther. I didn’t know any of the mechanics, but I knew that if I took that rod behind me, I could make longer casts with less effort. This revolutionized my casting and helped me catch more fish.

I began to show people the fish I caught (in those days we kept all of our fish) and what I caught them with. People did not believe that I caught them on a fly rod with popping bugs and streamers. I’d be on the river and overhear people say, What is that guy doing, what is that big thing that he’s throwing out there? It was such a curiosity to people that people commented on it at the time. People then thought that you only fly-fished for trout, they didn’t realize that you could also fly-fish for bass. Gradually, word got out, and I had maybe twenty guys in the local Frederick, Maryland, area where I lived who began to seriously fly-fish with me, and they formed a cadre of people that helped spread fly fishing, especially for bass.

It wasn’t long after these first forays into casting that I learned to double haul from little diagrams in the Wise Fishermen’s Encyclopedia, which was edited by A. J. McLane. I went to Cullers Lake in Frederick, laid the book on the ground, and learned to double haul from the diagrams in that book. Once I combined the double haul with extending the rod, things really started coming together. Had I just been a trout fisherman, I probably never would have modified the stroke that I first learned from Joe Brooks to help me cast farther and swim the fly through longer distances on bass rivers like the Potomac and Susquehanna. One of the reasons I began to develop the methods I did was that there really weren’t a lot of anglers fly-fishing for bass to influence me. I had no one to give me advice, which, in retrospect, turned out to be just fine.

OUTDOOR WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Brooks was a mentor and gave me a range of good advice in my outdoor writing career—everything from never use a big word when a small one will do, to the importance of getting out and learning about other fisheries. Before Brooks, American fly fishers thought an exotic fishing trip was driving into Canada. In the 1950s, Brooks was fishing for everything from tiger fish in Africa to brown trout in Argentina and New Zealand, and he made us all realize that there was a world of fly fishing outside of America. He did his share of promoting within the United States as well—jump-starting the bonefishing and tarpon in the Florida Keys and publicizing Montana trout fishing, so much so that the governor of Montana bestowed on him the title of Mr. Montana. Brooks was the guy who got us thinking outside of our local waters.

Back in the 1950s I was not making much money working at the biological warfare center in Fort Detrick, but I was earning some extra income writing outdoor columns for the Frederick News Post. At the time, there were probably only ten outdoor columns in the United States, and only four magazines on hunting and fishing. There wasn’t much information available for folks. Bergman and one or two others had trout fly-fishing books out, but there probably weren’t two dozen modern books available on fly fishing. When I started the outdoor columns, they took off, and I began writing for more and more papers. Most magazines commissioned illustrations or artwork, so when I began submitting photographs with my writing, it gave me a jump-start with the outdoor magazines Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, and Field and Stream.

In the mid-1950s, I realized that a lot of outdoor writers lacked knowledge about areas outside of their local stomping grounds. The outdoor writer from Georgia may know Georgia very well, but he doesn’t know about stripers in New Eng land, Atlantic salmon in Iceland, or steelhead in Idaho. I realized that I needed to travel. I began giving seminars and clinics because they would pay my travel fees, and I would always stay over two or three days and fish with the local experts, learning their methods. Fishing with so many good anglers made me realize that casting requirements varied. If you were casting tiny little 3-weights for trout, you’d only need a short, little stroke; if you were trying to throw a bass bug way back in the brush in Alabama, or you were trying to throw to a steelhead in the Clearwater River, you might have to make a totally different cast. I realized that casting had to be different depending on the situation. Through these clinics, I was able to fish around much of the United States, and many parts of the world, and in 5 to 7 years I was able to get a handle on many of the different fishing methods in fresh and