Nick Teynor is from Salt Lake City and works in the fishing business at Western Rivers Flyfisher. He’s an excellent fly caster and came up to West Yellowstone in September to do some fishing and cast in our local Wretched Mess casting competition. In this video he’s casting the accuracy part of the contest.
Later, Nick asked if I had any thoughts on his casting stroke. I did have a few observations, and Nick has graciously allowed me to share one of them here. Nick is an extremely powerful caster, though it’s not fully apparent here because he’s only casting 25-50 feet. (I recall he reached around 115 feet in the 5-weight distance part of the event.) His stroke is heavily reliant on the large muscles of the arm—those are powerful, to be sure—but overall he’s not as efficient as he could be. I suggested he revamp his stroke to incorporate more wrist movement.
You can see that Nick keeps his wrist more or less rigid on both the backcast and forward strokes. The bulk of the acceleration of the rod and line are accomplished with the big muscles of his arm. Our wrists (via forearm muscles), while not as strong as the rest of our arm, are very quick, and ideally we want to use the wrist for the easy acceleration it provides beyond what the upper arm can achieve on its own. That makes casting easier and more efficient overall.
Whether Nick decides to alter his stroke or not isn’t for me to say. It’s certainly not necessary for most fishing distances and situations, but if he wants to be truly fundamentally solid and a really long fly caster, he will. (Adding wrist to his stroke would allow him to get into the 120’+ range, a base level for tournament casting.) More sound fundamentals would also help his saltwater fly casting and any casting in strong wind.