S7, Ep 20: Practice Makes Perfect: Mac Brown on Mastering Casting Techniques

Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the Articulate Fly. We're back with another casting angles with Mac Brown. Mac, how are you?

I'm doing great. How you doing, Marvin?

As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble.

And you know, you finally got home from your western tour on the fly fishing show and gosh, you just told me you've got one night and tomorrow you start a fly fishing school.

That's right, we start of school tomorrow. So yeah, it's perfect timing. It's been nice here like in the 60s. Tomorrow they're calling for snow in like 50 mile an hour winds.

So I'm like, welcome back. But it's always that way early March.

Yeah, it's interesting. But you know, you were, you were more excited than normal.

You kind of got juiced up by spending a lot of time with students and you had some stuff from the road you wanted to relate to, folks.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I wanted to talk about just the, the tool that everybody has in their pocket for when we talk about all these podcasts and about improving their casting once people know what it is they're looking for. We had a guy in one of the classes out there that, that took a school last year named Al.

And when he got up, I, you know, I see a lot of people on the road and I was like, man, it looks like he should be doing a demo, you know. And I asked him, where'd you learn that? He said, I learned that in your class last year, the two and a half hour distance class.

And he's really worked at it three to four hours a week for the past year, for 52 weeks. And I'm not kidding you, it totally transformed like what he'd been doing for all these years.

And it was just, it's really gratifying when you see that. When you see somebody that comes back and says, you know, I use my phone, I look at it and I study it and I go back and I try it again.

And that's really a kind of a cool thing, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. So if we break that down a little bit, you know, one, and this is something you and I talk about a lot. We talk about practicing with purpose, right?

Oh yeah.

Practicing with purpose and just getting the acquisition of this with knowing what it is you to look for, you know, and a lot of people look for it and go, well there, I did one. You know, Marvin, I'm good. I did one.

And the reality is to get, to put it in retention is a Lot like, like there's a saying that I remember as a kid, like I used to be a big Bruce Lee fan, you know, about water and a lot of things. You've heard me talk about that before.

But he, he talks about one of the quotes that, that he came up with is, don't practice till you get it right, practice till you can't get it wrong. And that's what the phone can help people do.

Like once they know what they're looking for, is to practice and practice and practice till they can repeat it over and over in a consistent manner rather than saying, oh, Marvin, do you see that? The 20th cast, it finally looked good. I think a lot of people practice where they finally get one and they think they've got it.

And I really think the retention phase is totally different. The way, the way we put it into myelination, muscle memory, or whatever you want to call it, to where they can actually repeat it.

And that's what was so gratifying about CNL out there in California.

Yeah. And you were telling me, you know, he's practicing three hours a week. But you had a relatively kind of simple.

Because everyone's going to reach out and say, well, dude, what did you do? And you had a pretty simple practice routine. You want to share that with folks?

Well, the practice routine was just going through the basic fundamental stroke of making a proper back cast with full arm, full arm casting, not, not wrist casting or bicep, tricep casting, but the full arm being involved, where he sent the back cast every time up and in back, like kind of what we call tournament style, which is what's been around for 170 years. And that's what he practiced the most. And so he had just the perfect trajectory going upward at 5, 10 degrees.

You know, the back cast wasn't dropping downward to where it made it really a cakewalk to go forward and make it look respectable. And that takes people a lot of work knowing what causes that and what, what they gotta do to make that happen.

And I think, you know, we explained that a lot during that thing last year for him how that works. And he just, he just basically make. You gotta make people really come up to speed to where they know what it is they're supposed to do.

And when they see them not doing it on film, like when they use their phone and they understand exactly what it is they need to change. And a lot of times we don't have that out of body experience without using their phone.

Yeah.

And the interesting thing too, you were Telling me in the practice sessions, you were saying, you know, obviously come back to that foundational stroke.

And that's pretty consistent with, you know, like, the class you and I put together, like, you know, understand, you know, the perfect cast in the vertical plane. But then you also said that he spent some time.

Basically, you know, what you and I would talk about either, you know, changing the cast by basically application of force or reducing force to throw, like, curves and podcasts and tuck casts, too.

Right, Right. Yeah, he could do all that as well. He was in the aerial men class that we taught on Sunday out there, and he was already pretty gifted at all that.

He was already, you know, way ahead of the curve. And so I took him aside because Gary and I combined the class as Gary Borger, and I took him aside and did a whole bunch of extra things.

He was ready for the extra things, you know, so I kind of worked with him separately during the.

During that class because there was a lot of things that he wanted to know, you know what I mean, that were in addition to what he had already heard last year. So, yeah, it was really. It's really kind of neat just realizing, like, man, we didn't have that when I was a kid.

We didn't have cell phones in our pocket. We were doing it from the school of hard knocks, like, playing with it over and over and finally seeing these light bulb moments go off. And.

And, man, I look back at it now and think, just think if we had phones to be able to use back then, how it would have changed things.

Yeah, and I would say, too, you know, the phone is great, but there are also apps you can put on your phone that a lot of kids use for either football or particularly for baseball. One of them is called Coach's Eye.

And, you know, the great thing is you can shoot the video, but then you can also annotate it and, like, put, you know, where you really wanted the rod to stop. It makes it a lot easier to kind of look at the mechanics and break the mechanics down. So if people are interested in that, you can just go to the.

Go to the app store for the iPhone. I know coach's eyes 1. There are a couple others, but you'll find a bunch, and you can kind of play around with them.

And the cool thing with that is they're set up so that you can take the video and send it to a teacher to have it critiqued and have it sent back to you.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I use Coach's Eye quite a bit with. With different students. That we're mentoring.

And it's, it's a wonderful app because you can just, you can freeze frame it, say, you know, go, go, 26 seconds in, let's stop it right there. And they can do it in slow mo. They can stop it.

Then you can actually talk to them while, I mean like a zoom call where you're actually looking at it while you're, while you're talking about it or you can share screen. There's all kinds of possibilities there with it.

But, but yeah, we use it a lot for, for mentoring people around that don't live anywhere close to North Carolina. Like right now we're mentoring like five different people from Japan.

Like, I've never even met them, but we've been working on stuff for eight months.

And it's like you can do some amazing stuff from far away places and do it in the privacy of your house and literally it's the same thing as if you were standing there in a field with him, you know?

Yeah.

But, you know, then you also had the great experience while you've been on the fly fishing show circuit that, you know, a lot of international casters came, you know, whether it was Edison or Denver or out on the west coast too, right?

Oh yeah, like getting to hang out with Glenda, Glenda Powell from Ireland was, was really fun out in California. She was at Edison.

I just didn't get a chance to really talk to her a lot there because we were both so busy but so unpleasant and gave us quite a bit of time there Friday, Saturday, Sunday to talk about at night, you know, casting and different things. And he's just wonderful, wonderful teacher. You know, she's like one of the best women teachers I've ever met.

So I really enjoyed that, getting, getting to spend time with her. Yeah.

And there were a few other folks too, right?

Oh yeah, yeah, there's, there's, there's a bunch of them. Tony from the casting club that taught Tim and Steve and Chris when they were little with accuracy.

I mean, he's there from Japan and you know, I always love, that's the thing I love about Pleasanton is you got all this history going back a hundred, 100 plus years, actually 130 years through the clubs there at Oakland and Golden Gate.

And I mean the people that come out, you know, there's a lot of times somebody that really, really knows what's going on and it's just fun to spend time and you know, I would never get that living staying in Bryson City because all the history I Mean, there's not any tournament club coming out of Bryson City, even though there's a lot of good anglers and stuff.

I mean, but a lot of those world champions that came out of Golden Gate and Oakland over the years, I just think it's always really a, a fun place to be. It's one of the smaller shows of the, of the whole show circuit.

But the quality of the people that come to it, I think is just a lot of fun for me personally, because I was a huge fan of that when I was a kid.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting too. Right, so you've got two fly fishing shows left. You're going to be in Lancaster not this weekend, but next weekend. And then I guess you're going to.

There's a show in Minneapolis. Right. And then you're kind of done with shows and it's kind of guiding in schools, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's right. We got a school starting tomorrow and then the, the one in Lancaster, we got the all day class.

Gary's done with the show season and, and I'll run the all day class on Friday up in Lancaster. I don't even know what's, what's signed up or, or not. I don't know how many people's in it. I don't really know that until a few days before the show.

But I'm looking forward to doing it again up there. And then we'll do the Viroqua School in between Lancaster and the Great Water Show.

Then after the Great Water Show, I think I'm done with shows for the year.

Yeah.

And so you want to kind of give folks kind of a 30,000 foot view of, you know, obviously you're guiding but you know, kind of your upcoming schools and kind of how to get in touch and all that kind of good stuff.

Yeah. Best way is on either MacGround fly fish.com or the fly fishinggodschool.com that has all the different programs.

There's a lot of specialty weekend classes, depends what folks are looking at.

So what we tried to do a couple years ago because we had a lot of the, you know, five day schools and we realized, well, there's a lot of them that want to just come for two day school.

And so what we did is we just incorporated a lot of the, the things into the two days when the two day school would happen and just incorporate, bring more instructors and put them in the stuff that's already the five day school just for efficiency of scale, you know.

And that way if they only have two days to do it or three days, then they can, they can shorten it instead of having a whole specialized three day school when you're already running it. You know, it doesn't make sense to me at this age to say things over and over the next week. The same thing you said this week.

So I just think it's a better use of, of time and efficiency for what we're trying to do here.

Yeah.

So, you know, before, let's say, you know, what do you have kind of, you know, spring into early summer from a kind of a class perspective, just so folks can kind of start thinking about, you know, maybe making a trip to Bryson City.

Yeah, well, after this March when the, the middle April one's already filled out, so we'll have another one the end of April and that's still got a couple spots left. And then there's specialized like wet fly clinics and dry fly schools that are two days long. There's nymphing two day schools.

And we have the one, of course at Mountain Home, Arkansas was Davey Watt. That's going to be in October, that's listed on the website. And pretty much dealing with finishing those schools up. And then just trips.

Of course, it always happens. Since 1985, people will call, demand will jump big time in July, August, which has been one of the frustrating things for me personally.

That's not the time to come, you know what I mean? But you deal with tourists always in July and August and it's like the worst time of the year, to be honest with you.

But how to get that message out, I don't know. We've written articles, we've written all kinds of stuff, national publications. It's all over my website.

I don't think that'll ever change long, long after I'm gone. People will come to the mountains because it's cool in July, August and think they want to catch trout. It's just a tougher time of year to do it.

It's not the time to go learn it. It's what I'm trying to say. But want to do a trip and learn about the fundamentals that time of year, that's fine with me.

It's just, it's probably a tenth of the activity they would see in the springtime.

No, absolutely.

You know, folks, as I always say, you know, if you're somewhere in the country where it's starting to warm up and you can go fish, you should do that. If you can't do that, you know, and it's still cold, where you are. Tie some flies.

Or if you're close to one of these fly fishing shows, check them out. Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mac.

Tight lines, Marvin.