8. Special casts for sinking lines (8 of 20)

- [Tom] If you fish sinking lines, it's a good idea to modify your casting. Sometimes making one short cast to get your line on the surface and then a delivery cast works well. But let's visit Casting Instructor Pete Kutzer to get some detailed tips on casting sinking lines.
- [Pete] I'm going to talk to you about casting sinking lines and intermediate lines. When I make a cast, if I want to get a tighter loop, I like to stop right around eye level. Hi, I'm Pete Kutzer with the Orvis Fly Fishing Schools. Today I want to talk to you about casting sinking lines and ways you can use these really effective tools to catch fish in deep water situations.
Sinking lines are great effective tools when you're fishing with large bodies of water like this lake, maybe the ocean, even rivers in high water situations. With these sinking lines, though, they do provide a challenge. When we cast that line out onto the water and it starts to get down deeper and deeper in the water column, we can't pick that line out, back off the water to reset, and make another cast.
So we have to do a couple of things. We can either strip this line in, get to that shorter length of line, and then start to false cast this line out, back out to our target. Or we can do that roll cast pickup. Strip it into a moderate length, make a roll cast. Then we can pick it up, and shoot it back out.
- When we're fishing with these sinking lines and we have a large fly on or even a small fly, we do have to open up our loop a little bit. We want to open up that loop just a little bit using what's called a constant tension cast or Belgium cast. We're going to make a lower back cast, bring a run up, and then make a high-overhead forward cast.
This constant tension cast keeps that line under tension, like its name says, and allows us to get that fly out there with a lot less effort and gets us right on target. I'll make a low angle back cast, bring the rod up over the top, and it keeps everything nice and easy, so we can deliver that fly out to our target. Low angle back cast, over the head forward cast, low angle back cast, over the head forward cast.
That constant tension, keeping that leader nice and straight is going to help get that fly out there with a lot less effort when we're using sinking lines. ♪ [music] ♪