That’s right fellow fly-fishers, we’ve got big trouble with one of the pillars of our sport. It’s looming out there and nobody seems to want to address it. No, I’m not talking about tailing loops, drift or wind knots. Those are problems with fly-casters not fly-casting. The problem I’m talking about is fundamental. It strikes at the very nature of fly-casting.
There’s no easy way to say this, so here it is. Fly casting isn’t fly casting. That’s right, I said it. It’s a logical and philosophical gaffe of extreme proportions. Aristotle is rolling over in his grave right now. You see it breaks a principle that he held strongly which loosely says, “a thing can’t be itself and not be itself at the same time and in the same sentence”. But (with apologies to Aristotle and his social media followers) here we are.
To build on this and to be clear, I’m also saying that we fly-casters aren’t fly-casters; (I did it again, sorry Aristotle.) To be more specific; we don’t cast flies. You think I’m wrong about this? Go to your dry fly box, pull out a #20 parachute adams. Now try to throw it. How far did it go? See, I told you so. We don’t cast flies because we can’t. Flies don’t have enough mass to be castable unless they’re heavily weighted and then the question is begged, “is this really a fly?” But I’m digressing and angering another group of people. Now I have the philosophers, grammarians and the chuck-and-duck fly fishers mad at me. Where was I? Oh ya, we don’t cast flies; we cast fly lines. The leader, tippet and fly just go along for the ride.
I wish we could end it all here, but I’m sad to report that it gets even worse. Apologies, but we have to be fearlessly thorough here… We don’t really ‘cast’ anything, flies or fly lines. Casting is what people do with stones, spinning rods, and bait-casting rods. What we do is: use the mass of our fly lines to load our fly-rods with energy and release that energy at just the right moment and just the right way to produce a dynamic rolling loop in said fly line that propels itself and the leader/tippet/fly away from us and hopefully towards a fish.
And that’s the problem right there… That’s a mouthful. It’s much easier to say: “I’m going to practice my fly-casting” than “I’m going to practice using the mass of a fly line to store energy in my fly rod and …”; or to say, “your casting stinks”, than it is to say “you stink at using the mass of your fly-line to load your rod with energy and release that energy…” By the time you get through all that verbiage the really important part of the sentence, “you stink”, gets lost.
We’re in a pickle here. The current name ‘fly casting’ is terse and has a nice rhythm to it, but it’s completely misleading. On the other hand attempts to accurately describe what we do are verbose and cumbersome. I think that acronyms can help us out here. They’re a powerful tool for reducing complicated concepts into something catchy; to wit the government and the software industry uses them all the time. Here are my humble entries for solving the trouble with fly casting:
- “Fly Line Casting With Leader Tippet And Fly Along For The Ride” or FLCWLTAFAFTR. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it? What’s more we still have the word, “casting’ and I’ve shown incontrovertibly that we aren’t casting anything.
- “The Thing That Puts The Fly Out There” or TTTPTFOT. Slightly better and easy to understand but still pretty clunky. Can you imagine saying, “you really stink at TTTPAFOT’ing”? No, neither can I.
- “The Thing Formerly Known As Fly Casting” Now we’re getting somewhere. TTFKAFC isn’t exactly poetry, but it rolls off the tongue OK: “You just pierced my nose with your crappy Tutf-Kafc-ing.” That almost works. Reads a bit like a Russian hockey players jersey. But it’s still a lot of acronym to spew in the heat of the moment.
- Maybe if we leave the acronyms behind and use something that’s even more powerful at reducing large hunks of text into something manageable. We could create a symbol for fly casting. Perhaps something that looks like it was lifted from a Tolkien novel; one of the runes off the one ring of power just to add some mystery and danger. The symbol idea breaks down when we try to vocalize the concept behind the symbol. There are a few hand-gestures that come to mind but this is a family friendly article.
So where are we at? I don’t give up easily, but I’m stuck here folks. Fly casting isn’t fly casting and there’s no suitable replacement for the name; although I do kind of like the symbol idea. It could develop into a cottage industry selling t-shirts, mugs and bumper stickers…. I’m digressing again. It turns out that what we do is really complicated and I’m at a loss for words to quickly and accurately describe it.
Barring an epiphany, or even a half-way decent idea, it looks like we’re just gonna have to keep calling fly casting what it isn’t, and keep on doing what we aren’t doing. Anything else would be too confusing.