Has any one tried to fly cast with no rod

[DMV]

Hello:

A few years ago I was reading a book that had a few pages about casting a fly line with you hands, with out a fly rod just your hands doing the work. I can't remember which book it was that I read. But at the time I thought it was kinda funny.

Until this past summer when I tried it. At first casting a fly line with your hands I thought was impossible. I tried anyways, after a while of playing around I started to get a bit of distance. At the last local (to my area) club meeting I was able to get around 65 ft, that was roughly estimated.

After The Christmas holiday's I started to get curious if anyone has tried to cast a fly line with out a fly rod. Just having your line in hand and casting away.

Cheers: Dave

 

[DaFrogMan]

Wow! 65 ft... What line weight/taper were you using?

 

[plland]

Kind of like a really short, really fast action rod? That's very interesting. If you can get 65 feet, what kind of accuracy/presentation can you get, casting with just your arm?

 

[GeorgeMcFly]

haha poor mans fly fishing :wink: could work I guess if you can cast 65 feet! try it out next time you hit the water. lol.

 

[headhunter]

I tried it after wathcing Tim Rajeff do it. He was giving a seminar on casting for distance and after easily rifling casts well over 100 feet with the rod he spent the rest of the time just using his hands to demonstrate technique.

 

[Kai]

You REALLY need to take a video of this, and post it on youtube.

 

[DMV]

Hi:


I tried it with a 6 wt Wf fly line.

I was thinking of trying it for bass...

Accuracy .... I can manage to get the line to lay down in a general area but not to a specific spot....

A friend of mine has a good video camera and we area trying to get something together with it.......

By trying to cast with no rod, it gave me a better understanding of a fly line and how it works..... and made me think a little more about what I was doing differently before.


Cheers: Dave

 

[Pocono]

I Also watched Tim Rajeff do this "rodless" casting at last week's NJ Fly Fishing Show. He simply picked the line up from a rod tip, gave a single backcast with his arms and landed the fly (yarn) on his forecast in the middle of a hula hoop 50 ft. out. That was that; then he went on to cast with rods. It was a good lesson for me to visualize, as it really hits home on the point that a rod is simply a lever extension of your own arm. What the rod will do for your castng is, basically, an amplification of what you're actually doing with you arm (etc.) at the time of your cast. It's all body mechanics; simply translated through the rod. Basic take home message for me was three-fold: 1. work on your basic casting stoke (body mechanics), 2. do #1. over and over again (practice), and 3. Tim Rajeff is simply an extrodinary caster- absolutely no visible effort at all for casts of 100+ ft.

 

[Jakeway]

Joan Wulff was/is famous for that (plus a lot of other stuff). She would cast an entire length of line with just her hands.

It's suppossed to be great practice for your timing.

There's a short bit of that on her excellent tape "Joan Wulff's Dynamics of Fly Casting".

 

[redge]

Joan Wulff also discusses hand casting in her book Fly Casting Techniques at pp. 225-8.