How to Deal With Wind in Fly Fishing (12 of 35)

Let's face it. If you're fly fishing, you're gonna have to deal with wind. It's gonna happen. And there are a few things you can do to make fishing in wind a little bit more fun, a little bit more successful, and less frustrating. The first thing you can do is to shorten and stiffen your tippet. Wind can blow that tippet all over the place. And a longer tippet is gonna get pushed back by the wind and the fly is not gonna go where you want it to. So, shorten your tippet and sometimes even go to a heavier tippet, even if you think is a little bit too heavy for what you're doing, fish generally aren't as spooky in the wind. So you can generally go with a heavier tippet.
Now, another way is to shorten up your cast. Don't try to make a hero cast in the wind. Try to get close to the fish if you can. If you have to make a long cast, just know that you may hook yourself or you may end up getting frustrated. So if you can, try to get your boat or yourself closer to the fish and make those short casts. So if you have a wind blowing at you, as I do here, the best thing to do is to make a cast and make sure on a forward cast that you drop your elbow. Dropping the elbow is gonna slice your line down through the wind. So just when you cast, raise your elbow and lower your elbow.
If you cast and you push into the wind, if you push, you'll know you've been pushing because you look out here at the end of the cast and your arm's way out here. What you're doing with a headwind is you're just pushing straight against the wind rather than slicing down through it. So if you find yourself reaching way out here when you cast, try dropping that elbow and slicing down through the wind. If you've got a wind behind you, usually easier to make a cast because you got the wind giving you some help and it often helps to make a Belgian cast, which is to bring your rod off to the side on the back cast, and then straight over the top on the forward cast.
That'll keep your cast lower, lower to the ground where there's less wind. In fact, the Belgian cast is a really good cast to use in any windy situation. So it's very simply just do your back cast at an angle off to the side, come over to the top up, and come down. If you have a wind coming across your body so that your rod hand is on the far side, that's probably one of the best situations to be in. You can use that Belgian cast and come over the top, but the wind is gonna blow the fly away from you so that you're not gonna be in danger of hooking yourself when you get gust of wind.
If you've got wind coming toward your rod side, of course, when you make cast, that's gonna blow the fly into you. So it can be dangerous. Number of things you can do. If the wind is fairly mild and not too bad, you can use that Belgian cast and come over and go over the top. That'll work sometimes. But if the wind really starts to blow, you've gotta keep that cast on the other side of your body so that you don't hook yourself. So there's a number of things you can do. One is to just cast across the opposite shoulder by bringing your thumb up to your opposite ear.
So I'm gonna make a cast and I'm casting across the opposite shoulder rather than this shoulder, as I normally would. Again, that's gonna keep that back cast to the other side and keep it away from me. And also what you can also do is you can turn around, make your cast in that direction, and dump your back cast. So you can either go across here or you can turn around and make like you're casting in that direction, but dropping your back cast. When you're dropping that back cast for a cast, one of the things we tend to do is we tend to curl the rod tip around our body.
You wanna make sure that that rod tip goes in a straight line just as it all always should. And Pete Kutzer, the great casting instructor, tells me all the time to point your shoulder at where you want the fly to go, then make the cast and deliver it to that side. Casting in the wind isn't always fun. There are some days when you may just wanna quit, and that's totally okay. But if you keep your cast short, pay attention to where your fly is going, you can deal with a moderate amount of wind without much trouble.
[00:04:45]
[music]