In the process of teaching fly casting, certain faults of technique show up regularly among my students. In the notes I send to each student after a lesson, I find myself frequently reiterating certain basic principles. Here are a few of the most common. I hope they’ll stimulate you to think about your own casting.

Below Elizabeth Falls, where it thunders out of Black Lake, the Fond du Lac du Nord relaxes. The river sprawls across a boulder-studded delta, braiding into pools and riffles and narrow chutes before losing velocity and spilling into a mile-wide bowl. The roar of whitewater becomes a murmur, the murmur a sigh. A tall, flat-topped esker, so perfectly and symmetrically formed that it might have been engineered by an ancient civilization, cradles this widening on the far side. The near shore is lower, a gradual rise through willows and alders to the lance-like crowns of spruce.