The US Open Flycasting Championships will be held next week in San Francisco, attracting many of the best flycasters from around the world. Whitney Gould is among them, and this video shows her casting a round of accuracy during a recent training session. She was experimenting with three different rods, trying to pinpoint her choice for the competition.

At the beginning of the video note that Whitney double checks her grip. This is an important detail, much like a pro golfer doing the same before hitting a shot. She also realigns her body between targets in order to face the target. In this accuracy event you are not allowed to strip line off the reel before moving to the next target—it must be done while the fly is in the air. (We wouldn’t do this while fishing, since it makes changing distances more complicated.) Her false casts are used to measure distance precisely, with the fly carefully hovered over the target ever so briefly between the forward cast and the backcast. Depending on the lighting it can be quite difficult to see the fly hover, thus necessitating a fair number of false casts to be certain of the distance. The five rings she casts at here range in distance from 25 feet to 50 feet.