Excellent essay on casting improvement, Deanna!

You covered the basic themes very well:

1. Quality 1:1 instruction - live and in person...in a developing progression over time. You can teach someone to cast well enough to fish in one lesson, but you cannot make them a "fly caster." I know many great casting instructors...famous even...who will tell you THEY can't. 3 of the best I have ever met teach the basic casts (overhead and roll to 30-40') and tell their students to practice and go fishing and have fun for a year or 2 and then come back if they want to learn more.

2. Practice - the "mechanism" you said you couldn't name many of us nowadays call "muscle memory," borrowing the term from kinesiology (sports science). It is simply repeating the same task enough times the same way to make it reflexive...almost subconscious. This ONLY comes with proper practice...repetition is the father of learning. But my father (an awesome tennis coach and corporate trainer) always said, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect." Admittedly, he was an intolerable perfectionist. LOL But I got the idea.

3. Versatility as a goal - without solid fundamentals, advanced casting is impossible. And advanced casting opens up a whole new world of enjoyment in one's fly fishing. It truly does...even if you are perfectly content to fish for bluegills on farm ponds for the rest of your life. One of the finest casters I know is a small stream trout specialist who often fishes streams you can lay a typical fly rod across. Try to make an accurate presentation to trout sipping tiny mayflies into an 8' wide gin clear 2' deep trout stream with high vegetation lining both banks in a typical 15mph Rocky Mountain breeze and you'll figure out quickly what accuracy and presentation are all about! But that same guy can (who is an FFF Master Casting Instructor) can hit a tailing Bone Fish on the nose at 90' with a 9wt bamboo fly rod, too. So he can fish anywhere, anytime he gets the opportunity. And fishing with him once in a 30+ mph wind, he taught me some 1-handed spey techniques with our Hexagraph 5wt rods that allowed us to keep fishing for trout on some beaver ponds at about 10k' in the Jemez mountains.

4. Different grips, styles, and techniques have different strengths and weaknesses - like tools in a toolbox. They are all good to have in your arsenal, but "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." As an adaptive casting instructor, I encounter people all the time who have had to stop fly fishing because of an injury or degenerative condition. Universally, this is because they only knew one way to cast. Had they understood the 5 fundamental concepts of what makes a fly cast work, they probably could have figured out a new way to cast on their own. But in every case so far, I've been able to help them adapt their cast to a new, painless, effective fly cast within an hour.

5. It's not rocket science - you made it sound simple and attainable, and it is! Too many casting instructors and those who write about it fall into the trap of either trying to impress folks with what they know or simply not having the communication skills to take the complex and make it simple. Every physical action is actually very complex if you break it down. The human body is a very complicated machine! Add a fly rod, reel, line, leader, and fly, and it's even more complex. But making it all work is actually quite simple when you ignore all the BS. It is only when you get to the advanced stuff that you have to pay attention to one or more of those details.

Nowadays, it's very rare to read plain language casting advice that is worth a hoot. But yours is always excellent. So was Jim's. Thank you for your leadership over the years.