At Deneki, it is no secret that we love to swing flies. When we talk about sink tips, we are usually thinking about using them on our two handed rods. While this is often the case, there are also situations where we find ourselves wanting to fish a sink tip with a single hand rod. Maybe we are patrolling weed lines on a reservoir for northern pike or floating a deep river in search of brown trout, circumstances like this will find us over hand casting a sink tip. Those of you who have done this understand the difficulty that comes with this task, double hauling a heavy sink tip is not easy and can lead to a large hook buried in the back of your head. Yet the need to get our flies deep, and keep them deep throughout the retrieve keeps us doing the ole “chuck and duck” routine. Here are 5 tips to help improve your over hand casting with a heavy sink tip.
- Slow down! Sink tips are heavy. Imagine all the weight that is in your sink tip and your fly. Take that total weight and picture a small rock that weighs the same amount. If you are trying to cast that rock with a fly rod, you can’t just snap it back and forth like a weightless dry fly. You have to slow everything down and almost swing it.
- Cast more side armed. Following up on our previous point, you want to almost swing the fly and sink tip. Start your cast low, curl upwards. Your backcast especially should be in a side armed and curved direction. You don’t want super tight loops with this style of casting.
- Minimize false casts. This will save you a ton of energy throughout your day. Usually when fishing a situation where you are using a sink tip to cover water you are going to be casting a lot. Don’t destroy your shoulder with unnecessary false casts.
- When letting the fly go, you want your final forward cast to be at a slightly upwards trajectory. Launching the fly at this angle will give you some extra distance on your cast.
- Do not try and pick up a lot of line off the water and go straight into your next cast. You’ll want to strip the fly almost all the way in, or at least until you get part of the sink tip out of the water. Casting this set up is much different than fishing a floating line where the line remains on the surface. If the tip is sunk below the surface, it will be very difficult to pick up and go straight into your next cast. Strip that fly all the way in first.
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