Getting in touch with the art of fly casting
A little time with master angler Dave Whitlock unlocks a door to artistry in fishing
When you are with one of the great ones it has to occur at some point just how danged lucky you are to be in a position to spend a little time with that person, to learn and to just watch and enjoy.
Thing is, every time I’m around Dave and Emily Whitlock the overwhelming feeling is that I’m just hanging out with a couple of good friends. They’re pretty much that way with anyone. Just ask just about anyone who has met them.
Twice in the past 13 months I’ve had the pure joy of being assigned to write stories about Dave Whitlock and as a result spent the better part of a couple of great days at “Dave and Emily’s” near a spot on the map in eastern Oklahoma called Welling.
Their home is on the Caney Creek Ranch, named for the creek that flows into the Illinois River and the place young Dave childhood friend John T. Nickel (who owns the ranch) caught their first Neosho smallmouth bass on a fly rod. They were 14 years old then, about 72 years ago. I’ll let you do the math.
Suffice to say Whitlock’s resume and what the Dave and Emily team have accomplished since 1991 is well worth a Google for those who don’t know him. Those who do recognize the name of artist/angler/author and more than one hall-of-fame listing know what I’m talking about.
The couple lives in one of those spots in the world that, as my wife, DeAnna, put it upon her first walk around the grounds, “I don’t think I would ever want to leave.”
A spring-fed trout stream runs the length the front of the property and a casting pond where they hold fly-fishing schools is just outside around the back of the house. Just across the driveway is a guest home and Dave’s art studio is upstairs, where it gets a glow from the sun from ample windows and crisp light fixtures that make his color wax pencil works really pop. In corner nook of the studio is his grandfather’s old office desk, which has been the fly-tying foundation behind tens of thousands of Whitlock creations for decades.
It is here that I, a fly-fisherman of some 35 years of more-off-than-on expereince and a habitually attention deficient student of the art, had an undeserved but needed reintroduction to a things I should have learned better along the way.
One of them was the roll cast. In relatively tight quarters, when trees or overhanging brush leave no room for a standard forward cast, what folks recognize as that overhead fly-casting back-and-forth fly-swatter motion most of us get into—the roll cast is the answer. It also is a handy way to get line out onto the water to straighten it out and make an initial forward cast.
By way of self-defense—or perhaps confession—I generally have been one who reads the book or takes the instruction, adopts the gist of things and proceeds in a way that makes sense to me. That’s not always best, especially if the learning fades without regularly exercising the mind and muscle memory, and that has been the case with my off-and-on relationship with fly-fishing.
Fly-fishing, and other things. My offhand learning methods have given rise to a hoard of bad habits in everything from archery to wingshooting—more if I could think of an activity that started with Z.
This is the framework on which I carry you, dear reader, to the banks of that clear, spring-fed stream with the hall-of-famer who has taught countless hapless souls such as myself and fished the world with some of the best in the game.
He asked, “do you know how to roll cast?
With clear memory of my first casts and first Arctic grayling catches in 1986 with that $45, 9-foot, 5-weight Fenwick Eagle combo in my hand the response was, “sure!” I’d been roll casting for decades. Apparently not very well, but I was doing it.
Dave kindly showed me “the lift” as a cure for a not-so-great roll cast that day. It’s a cure for a weak cast when the line isn’t “rolling” out there like it should and the leader is going to “pile up” at the end. A little lift of the rod tip can draw just enough tension back into that flacid line to save the presentation in the end.
Everyone gets into a spot or gets a little lazy now and then and makes a not-so-great cast so it’s a handy trick to know. Emily told me later it’s a great way for folks to look like they know what they’re doing even if they’d just flubbed it.
The Whitlocks were so darned nice about it that it didn’t sink in until I was driving home the number of lifts I did that day. In reality I had adopted it as a regular part of my roll cast. So it finally hit me that when it came to roll casts I was just one big ol’ flubber!
A few things helped me along the way to a better roll cast after that day. First, I grabbed my fly rod and went to work with it in 2020. I used that fly rod more this year than I have in at least 12 years. It started with a farm pond and a vision of Whitlock’s illustrative casts that day ingrained in my head like a short film reel.
I worked at it and I got close, but I still felt like I was working at it so much harder than Whitlock. His casts were effortless.
Then I met another Dave and a light came on. David Chin, who builds bamboo fly rods, handed his rig to me and let me play on a small local creek for a few hours. In a heartbeat I was using his 7 ½-foot 3-weight bamboo rod and pulling off rollcasts like I’d only seen on TV.
No question, the rod had a lot to do with that performance but, mostly, it was a rod with high-quailty guides matched with a quality line that showed me that my stuggling roll casts weren’t all me. The line worked will with the action of the rod and the slightest relase of the line let it escape through my fingers and down the guides. It was match made in heaven as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want to stop.
In the L.L. Bean Ultimate Book of Fly Fishing, Whitlock noted the need for practice and extolled the joys of skilled casting.
He wrote: “There is a poetic, hypnotic, almost sensuous feeling to casting a fly well. A good fly caster seems graceful and artistically endowed, and with practice you can feel this way, too!”
It’s right there in the book, right there from the master instructor.
In the video attached to this column Whitlocks says, “you really need to learn how to roll cast good before you really become a complete fly fisherman.”
I still need to do a lot of “learning” but I know what poetry feels like and the artistry might just come sooner than later.
Contact Dave and Emily Whitlock about fly-fishing instruction or look for Dav’es artwork, books, videos, flies and other items for sale at davewhitlock.com.