Marvin: Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the Articulate Fly,
Marvin: and we're back with another Casting Angles with Mack Brown. How are you, Mack?
Mac: I'm doing great. How are you doing, Marvin?
Marvin: As always, just trying to stay out of trouble. And, you know,
Marvin: we were talking before we started recording.
Marvin: We're recording this on the evening on Memorial Day. We want to wish all of
Marvin: our veterans in active duty, military, a happy Memorial Day and thank them for
Marvin: everything they do for us.
Mac: That's right a lot of them gave it all and it's a great day to remember and
Mac: honor those vets that served.
Marvin: And I'll also just put out a public service announcement close to where I grew
Marvin: up in Lynchburg but in Bedford Virginia on June 6th there's the National D-Day
Marvin: Memorial and they're going to have a very very special,
Marvin: multi-day ceremony to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion,
Marvin: Oh.
Mac: That'd be good. Are you going to go up?
Marvin: I very well may. I'm still trying to kind of work things out,
Marvin: but it's an amazing thing.
Marvin: And one of the reasons why they put the National D-Day Memorial there was because,
Marvin: you know, back in the Second World War, you know, a lot of times you served
Marvin: kind of with everybody from your hometown. town.
Marvin: And apparently Bedford had the highest casualty rate of kind of any town in
Marvin: the United States on D-Day.
Marvin: So it's there. It's a phenomenal memorial.
Marvin: And I think, you know, if folks make the effort to get up there,
Marvin: they won't be disappointed.
Mac: Well, that sounds like a good time. Maybe we'll go up there and stay at your
Mac: mom's and eat lasagna and go to bed.
Marvin: That yeah there you go and maybe get a little uh smallmouth bass fishing in
Marvin: but uh speaking of uh smallmouth bass i know it's been uh you know in our neck
Marvin: of the woods down here in the mid-atlantic we've been getting ripped with rain
Marvin: um and uh you and i were talking before we started recording that uh unless
Marvin: you like chocolate milk you probably need to stay off the dh and head up high right.
Mac: Pretty much we've been getting hammered with thunderstorms like for weeks like
Mac: every just just about every day and it's run chocolate out there.
Mac: There's not a lot of floats and things going on. It's been pretty dirty for
Mac: about two and a half weeks.
Mac: So we've been going up on the wild streams more up high and that those are fishing really well.
Marvin: Yeah. And I know you also had some good news because, uh, I saw your Instagram
Marvin: feed that both the, uh, most important to you, right?
Marvin: Cause your son's run on the boys team, but the boys and the girls track team
Marvin: at Swain County high school won the state championship.
Mac: That's right. Yeah, that was really neat. We've been going down there since
Mac: Connor was in high school, and he graduates next week.
Mac: And it's been a long learning process for all of them,
Mac: and it was nice for those seniors that are going out to go out that way because
Mac: that's the first time in Swain County history that the boys pulled that off.
Mac: And the girls, I think that was the girls' 10th state title in a row.
Mac: The girls really have a dynasty going here. right now, but I thought that it
Mac: would lead us in maybe to just talking about goals because, you know,
Mac: I was thinking about my son graduating.
Mac: He started doing all this in third grade and he was serious about it.
Mac: You know, real serious like through middle school and high school.
Mac: Just talk about some basic kind of goals if people go up high to try out the,
Mac: you know, the wild streams to have a purpose what they're doing there.
Mac: You know, there's so much on social media showing these, you know,
Mac: nice fish and And this and that all over the country, but it's like,
Mac: I think the big process is to have a specific goal.
Mac: Just from doing this for 40 years, I'd say a great goal for the listeners would
Mac: be to go out and just pick a big dry soil you can see.
Mac: You know, something like a golden stone. There's still a lot of golden stones
Mac: out there. So a size 12 golden stone that you can see in fast water.
Mac: And just work on drift for the whole day. and when we say we've got to make
Mac: a goal with that I would say work on drift a lot of people go well that's a
Mac: good drift and it's two or three feet and other people say well six feet,
Mac: well if somebody really plays that game.
Mac: Then it really shouldn't be a limit. You know, even with the multiple complex
Mac: currents, they ought to be able to pull out 20, 30 feet and make it go from
Mac: 30 feet above to 30 feet below. Now we're talking 60 feet.
Mac: So that's all line control, what we do after it's on the water.
Mac: As much as we teach and talk about casting, Marvin, I think that the drift exercise
Mac: is just a wonderful drill for line control of what we do to enhance it.
Marvin: Yeah, and it's interesting, right, Because you kind of start with where you
Marvin: put your body to get the best cast possible.
Marvin: But what we're really talking about, depending on conditions,
Marvin: is probably some type of a reach cast.
Marvin: And then you're managing your line until it comes to you and gets below you.
Marvin: And then you're going to probably start stack mending below you to keep the drift.
Mac: And there's going to be stack mends. Like if we do the example I just said and
Mac: go 60, that's one of the main drills.
Mac: I can remember years ago with the youth kids when they were winning all the gold in Europe.
Mac: Every one of those kids that was on that would work with them individually up
Mac: in the park and that was the goal i mean i just tell them look we're going to
Mac: go from here to there let them try it first let them fail show them how to do
Mac: it then they'd copy it and that was so,
Mac: important for pulling off those kind of drifts and so a lot of hump men's um you know a hump man,
Mac: is different it's like going up up up so when we're paying line
Mac: out below us but yeah there'll be stacks it's just
Mac: here's the thing to go like on a gradient
Mac: rich stream like the smoky size you're going to be doing something with the
Mac: rod the entire time it's never sitting out it's either being humped in or getting
Mac: ready to stack it out or something and that's that's what i've you know that
Mac: i've seen a lot over the years guiding that um.
Mac: Makes you want to go fish more than God, you know? Yeah. People don't see that
Mac: naturally. And so I'm saying it's a drill for people to improve.
Mac: Yeah, make the goal big, not just five, six feet. Make it big goal.
Mac: And you'll find that the more they exercise that drift game and,
Mac: you know, put the fish second, put drift as their priority, the fish will start following.
Mac: They're going to catch way more numbers of fish than they've ever dreamed of
Mac: just by making drift their exercise.
Marvin: Yeah. And then I guess we should also add that, you know, that's really talking
Marvin: about dead drift, but we also want to talk about learning to animate the fly
Marvin: and manage your line, right?
Mac: Oh, yeah. That's another one of the tricks. Like, is it going down?
Mac: You get it like in a little pocket or something to animate it and make it,
Mac: you can make it hop and skitter and dance.
Mac: That's what Mark Cathy was famous for here, is the animation of the fly,
Mac: you know, to make it look like it's alive.
Mac: And the best way to do that is in the evening, watch a don that's going down
Mac: the river late in the day, and it gets to a rapid at the tail end of a pool, and watch what it does.
Mac: When it sees the fast water coming up, it's got great eyesight,
Mac: and you'll watch it start jumping and skittering, trying to get flight,
Mac: trying to get flight while its wings are getting hardened. and it'll do everything
Mac: in its power to not go down in the riffle.
Mac: You know what I mean? To get flight. It'll do those little exercises.
Mac: So when it gets to the tail, it'll try to get flight.
Mac: It might come off the water six, eight inches and land four feet back up from
Mac: the tail of the pool and it drifts and it comes back up.
Mac: You can learn to animate that and mimic that with the line control that we're talking about.
Mac: You can do that with a dancing line mend than to make it come back up.
Mac: And I mean, so it's the combination. But I think deadrifts, I think it's easier to animate.
Mac: I don't know, I shouldn't say that. I guess everybody's different.
Mac: I mean, it might be easier.
Mac: I think deadrifts, though, you can mix them up, like practice deadrifts exercises,
Mac: then practice animating exercises, then practice the combination together, you know, to do both.
Marvin: Yeah, and then really to kind of step back out of it, what we're really talking
Marvin: about is the stuff that we've talked about over and over and over again about,
Marvin: you know, you know, striving for continuous improvement, being curious.
Marvin: And, you know, the great thing is you don't have to eat the elephant all at
Marvin: one time. You pick kind of one thing you want to work on on the water and go work on that.
Marvin: And, you know, you just, you know, you get it sort of figured out and then you
Marvin: kind of put that in your quiver and, you know, you pick another thing to work on.
Marvin: You don't have to like, you know, become the greatest fly fisherman ever on
Marvin: one outing. You know, you just kind of have to have a methodical approach.
Marvin: I imagine it's a lot like the way your boys train for track.
Mac: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, they got specific goals. And, yeah, I mean,
Mac: looking at the schedule of what they did two months leading up to state,
Mac: I mean, it's pretty intense.
Mac: I went up there a lot to watch them. And what they do is they start resting
Mac: you less and less. So you're doing like 400 repeats, 200 repeats.
Mac: You know, normally early in the season, you might have a minute rest.
Mac: They keep cutting that time down and cutting it down to where you got 15-second
Mac: rest and you're still doing the same number. So it ends up being a lot higher
Mac: intensity because there's not as much rest in between.
Mac: But same thing in angling. I like that idea, what you said about don't try to
Mac: eat the elephant all at once because that's really true. I mean,
Mac: to be honest, it's impossible.
Mac: Nobody could eat the elephant all at once in a day, not with the amount of things that are out there.
Mac: There's just too many things to say. Somebody could do that in a day.
Mac: So, so having, having small goals that are attainable and to keep working on
Mac: those and keep building on those as far as like building blocks is really the best way to get it.
Marvin: Yeah. And I would say, you know, you know, thinking about that,
Marvin: I mean, there's so many things that actually have nothing to do with being on
Marvin: the water, right? Like your knots, right?
Marvin: Having your, you know, your gear arranged, right? And that's like,
Marvin: I'm a huge proponent of, you know, you can change your gear configuration,
Marvin: but don't change it every time you go out.
Marvin: Because if you reach in a pocket, you want the same thing that was there last
Marvin: time, unless you've made a conscious decision to move it somewhere else for a reason.
Marvin: And those are the things, you know, over time that, you know,
Marvin: you'll be able to get ready faster, you'll be able to re-rig faster,
Marvin: and you'll just become more confident on the water.
Mac: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they can do, I mean, knots are a great thing to do at home.
Mac: That's the best place to get fast at those, get fast at those at home.
Mac: And the key is, is just have a couple of knots. You don't need,
Mac: I mean, my gosh, fly fishing has so many different specialty knots,
Mac: but the way to do it, like what we use in the school, is really just two knots.
Mac: I mean, pretty much everything you ever want to do is two knots.
Mac: And you don't need, I mean, that's a big part of what intimidates people about
Mac: this sport is thinking about all the different knots and there's really not that many.
Mac: You can make it really simplified as far as once you have your butt section,
Mac: the leader on there, everything is two knots.
Mac: Then get fast at them, get them down three seconds, three, four seconds or less.
Mac: Yes, because I mean, I see far too many people in God and they get proud and
Mac: want to tie their own rig.
Mac: And I'm just like, let me tie it for you. No, I want to tie it.
Mac: And you look at them tie it and it's like six, eight minutes later,
Mac: you know, that's time wasted.
Mac: Get them fast. Six, eight minutes is unacceptable. I'll just go ahead and say it.
Marvin: But, you know, it's funny too, right? Because we've got, I don't know what we've
Marvin: got, maybe, I don't know, two weeks of DH left in North Carolina.
Marvin: So, you know, things are going to change. And so, you know, kind of building
Marvin: on this education theme, Mac, I know you've got some topical schools throughout the summer.
Marvin: You want to tell folks a little bit about those, kind of where they can get more information.
Marvin: And also, I know you're taking people down the river. And if you're not,
Marvin: you've got people that work with you that are.
Mac: Mm-hmm. Yeah, we've still got like a wet fly.
Mac: There's a dry fly school this weekend, a wet fly school coming up.
Mac: We run those specialty schools like two days long ton of a short like the week
Mac: long school we do compressed into two days just dedicated to the one,
Mac: topic and that way you know people can look at those and if they want to work
Mac: on you know their wet fly game and then we cover pretty much everything,
Mac: that we do in the week long school on wet fly during that and that just gives
Mac: them an opportunity and they can find that info on,
Mac: either on social media stuff Go to the website, mackbrownflyfish.com.
Mac: That's the easiest place to find it.
Marvin: Yeah, but you're an email or a phone guy, right?
Mac: Yeah, pretty much, or text. I like text. Texts work good, too,
Mac: because I'm in and out of service a lot this time of year.
Mac: When I go up high in the park, as soon as I go a mile from the house,
Mac: there's no service up there,
Mac: so I don't get the message until later on and leave a message,
Mac: too, because these days I'm getting so many telemarketers too a day that it
Mac: might be somebody looking for one of those schools,
Mac: but if I don't leave a message, then I assume it's a telemarketer.
Marvin: Yeah, there you go. And folks, I would say just remember, eat the elephant one
Marvin: bite at a time and just pick one thing to work on and work on it until you get
Marvin: it right and then add another thing.
Marvin: And as I always say, you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few.
Marvin: Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mac.
Mac: Tight lines, Marvin.