Whenever a thoughtful, well-written story on fly casting pops up on the web, you can bet that some folks will be incredibly appreciative of the information. They’ll embrace the challenge of becoming better casters and soak up everything there is to learn from the piece.

Others, though, will dismiss fly casting as an unnecessary skill; one that simply isn’t relevant to their trout fishing. They’ll proclaim that they already catch plenty of fish and since “trout-in-the-net” is their metric of choice, fly casting must, of necessity, be overrated.

Curling, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is an arcane winter sport of Scottish origin in which one player slides a 42-pound disc of polished granite down a sheet of ice toward a kind of bullseye target. This disc, called a “stone,” moves at a glacially slow rate of speed, and as it’s doing so the other players furiously sweep the ice ahead of it with brooms in order to influence its velocity and direction of travel.