My casting repertoire for a long time has lacked a good back-cast presentation. I have been trying to compensate for my lack of a good back-cast presentation with off-shoulder casting. Recently on a tarpon trip my son was on the bow and I was on the back taking pot shots after fish got by Chris. The Bimini top was up because it was very hot as it usually is in tarpon season. Casting to the port side for me as a right-handed caster was difficult already because to keep from casting through the boat I had to do an off-shoulder or cack-handed type forward cast. I’ve heard it called “chest-casting” as you are limited by your own chest. The Bimini made this type of casting even more difficult and once I banged the Bimini with my arm and dropped the leader and fly into the boat. My guide didn’t say anything but I’m sure he wasn’t happy. I really could have used a good back-cast presentation which would have put all the fly line over the water safely behind the boat. More accuracy and distance would have been nice too.
So that experience made it clear to me that I needed to come up with a back-cast presentation before my next trip. I went to work on “the Youtube” and found quite a few examples, none of which gave me what I needed. All of the suggestions steered toward a side-arm cast with a stiff wrist and many hinted that a forty foot cast would be all that one should expect from a back-cast presentation. All of the methods of Pete, Andy, Bruce, Paul, equated to locking the reel seat and fighting butt against the forearm and using a stiff wrist with mostly rod translation, which makes the forty foot expectation understandable.
Using their advice, I wasn’t happy with the results. My casts were ugly, unpredictable, not accurate and too short. I finally just started trying to adapt what I do with my normal casting stroke and just reversing it. That seemed to work but without being able to include my bicep in the back-cast, I just didn’t have enough power.
That’s when I started doing a pre-load, slipping line in the forward cast (which is the back-cast in this case) and using that pre-load to get more energy. Things started coming together. Then one day I got the idea that maybe I could do a slide-load for more power. For those of you unfamiliar with slide-loading, it is sliding the rod forward down the line as line is still slipping and then catching the line and hauling. The combined effect of inertia from the line moving one way and the rod moving the other way and grabbing that energy by pinching the line and hauling provides a great deal of load.
The results were just what I was looking for. Easy, no-strain casting with pretty loops, extended layout and distances that completely eliminated the short cast expectation.
Slide loading in the back-cast presentation is actually much easier to practice and get the timing right because you can see the line in front of you. With enough practice you can get the feel and not have to watch the fly-line and start making the slide-load back-cast while keeping your eyes on the fish.
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