After a week of practicing my back-cast presentation (BCP) using slide-loading (see previous posts), I felt like I have that cast down and was ready to try something new. I realized that when I’m doing the BCP, I am getting the timing right because the cast is across my chest making it easy to watch the rod tip. As soon as I see the slightest bend during the slide, I haul. Simple. And after doing it so many times I can also do it without looking, say, to keep my eyes on a fish.
Feeling confident, I thought to myself, OK, using a slide-load in the forward cast is unpredictable because I can’t really watch the rod tip which, beginning the forward cast, is behind me. But, I CAN see the rod-tip in front of me when I begin to make my last back-cast. I considered that maybe I could slide load to make a more powerful back-cast and the increased speed/energy in the back-cast might in turn help me make a better (longer) forward cast?
So I tried it and it worked. The back-cast was harder and faster and when I did my pre-load I could feel the additional load in the rod. The first time I tried it, 112 feet, measured with a laser range finder.
I can say that I now have added slide-loading to my normal, face-forward, cast presentation, not by using it on the last presentation cast, but in the back-cast that precedes the forward cast. I cast pretty long anyway so it didn’t add a lot, maybe ten to twelve feet. Most folks wouldn’t think that amounts to “revolutionary”, but before the slide-load I was basically tapped out just above 100 feet. What would a golfer pay to have several strokes come off their handicap? What would a field goal kicker pay to get ten more feet? I don’t know but I would have paid a thousand dollars for another ten feet in my distance casts. This is a big deal to me. I am loving the extra distance. I would use it in my forward cast too if I could just perform it reliably, but sometimes it fails and when it does, it’s ugly. But I can do the back-cast slide-load correctly every time.
I first discovered slide-loading on my own seven years ago and I wrote a post about it then, The Slide-Loading Epiphany. In it I reference information from Joan Wulff and George Roberts. Just recently I scoured the Internet but I can’t find any more information on slide-loading than I did back when I wrote the post. I think the best take on it comes from Joan Wulff. She describes it the best and she suggested that many tournament casters may be using it and not even realizing it. (Although I think it is very possible that they do realize it and just want to keep it for themselves.)
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