As a small Colorado company, we love to collaborate with other local businesses to build relationships and support each other. It’s a great way to meet a number of wonderful, solid people and learn about other Colorado companies. Zen recently had a terrific night at Spirit Houd Distilleries, makers of exceptional gins, vodkas, rums and whiskies.
Born through the creation of a small pack of friends in the town of Lyons, CO, Spirit Hound has earned a reputation for handcrafting everything from the spirits themselves to the labels and bottles used to identify and preserve them. The company has made big waves throughout the region and internationally. Today, Spirit Hound is proud to offer 17 (and counting) varieties of craft spirits, each with its own unique, Rocky Mountain-inspired flair.
I was flattered when I was contacted by Sarah Current, Tasting Room Operations Manager for the distillery, and asked to be a guest speaker. She has a connection and relationship with Nate Otteman, Manager of Angles Ski, Board and Fly Shop in Longmont, a recent dealer of Zen Tenkara products. The collaboration was perfect.
Sarah asked me to speak on the different fly-fishing destinations I’ve traveled to around the world. However, a week before my talk I noticed on the Spirit Hound website the night was advertised as a presentation on The Art and Science of Fly Fishing. Oops, just a slight miscommunication. This was going to take some real thinking.
As some of you know, I do talk about the Fishing Triangle, a concept I created to explain fish management on a tenkara rod. So I’ve delved into the idea of physics and geometry playing a part in fishing before. This time I decided to dig deep into fly casting – whether using a regular rod and reel or a tenkara rod. So much emphasis is placed on casting. Whether we are good casters, how far we can cast, our accuracy and our control. I believe if we have a more thorough understanding of the science behind a successful cast, the more like we are able to produce one.
Understanding what needs to happen to make a good cast and what motions create those actions seem pertinent. So, I jumped down the rabbit hole of the scientific definition of a Tool (our fly rod), and Force (our fly line when moving) and then refamiliarized myself with Newtons First Law of Motion and the Euclidean Distance Formula. It was all distantly familiar from my high school days but seemed much more straight forward and understandable as I reviewed it now. Why hadn’t Mr. Hinden, my AP Physics 1 & 2 teacher, used fly fishing to explain this stuff back then?
It boils down to your fly rod being a Tool. A tool is something that utilizes or stores energy. No different than a baseball bat, a golf club, a hammer or a screwdriver. In order to get energy or utilize the potential energy in your tool, you need a Force to act upon it. Force is mass times acceleration or F = m x a.
Your fly line has weight, grain weight to be precise. Put on a scale, it weighs a certain amount. Different fly lines have different overall weights (ex. 3wt, 5wt, 8wt, 12wt lines). Additionally, a 15ft section of 5wt line, will weigh less than a 45ft section of 5wt fly line. Follow me? More line, more weight, less line, less weight. Your fly line is the mass. It represents m in the formula.
Guess what your stroke represents? It is the acceleration or a in our formula. Your fly line has weight and is a mass, but it needs to be accelerated in order to create a Force which can then impact your tool by bending it (loading), which is how the energy is created and eventually utilized in your tool/fly rod. Make sense? Of course, there are variables like speed and power that impact your stroke or the acceleration And, once we apply a Force to our Tool, we still need to get all that stored energy out of the rod and transfer into the line in order to propel it outwards into a cast. That’s where a solid stop in your front cast and a solid stop in your back cast come into play. Those stops are how energy is transfers from the rod to the line.
Here’s where Sir Isaac Newton’s Law of Motion and Mr. Archimedes of Syracuse Euclidean Distance Formula come into play. I promise you it isn’t difficult to understand and absolutely defines your fly cast. It boils down, basically, to this: The shortest distance between two points, (you and a fish or your target cast spot) is a straight line. And where your rod tip goes, your line follows.
If you want to make an accurate clean cast, your rod tip needs to move in an accurate, clean way that doesn’t “waste or dilute” energy by swerving, drifting, dipping or swooping up. Your stroke needs to be efficient and precise. This allows you to utilize all the energy and deliver it into your rod tip and thus your line. If you swerve or round-out your stroke either vertically or horizontally, your line follows the tip and is now travelling farther than it has to. A clean even stroke doesn’t waste energy.
Think of it this way: If you marked a point exactly one mile away and drove your car straight there, you’d travel exactly one mile. But if you drive zigzag or swerved around while driving to that point, you’d end up driving more than a mile. Don’t make your fly line travel farther than it has to by drifting out of your casting land, or casting plane.
If this is making sense or is pushing you to think about your cast, then you should listen to my presentation on our Zen YouTube channel. A “practice” run was recorded before talking at the distillery. I run through all these points with a fuller explanation that I think will shed even more light onto the concept. In the meantime, thanks for reading and I hope these ideas will help you consider your cast and if you are struggling with any part of it, maybe understanding the science behind it, will help you to analyze and critique it effectively to make your own improvements.
Tight lines and happy fishing!
