Fly Fishing for Carp Drag and Drop Presentation
A tutorial in performing the drag and drop presentation when fly fishing for carp. This method is a way of getting a fly extremely close to a carp ("on the dinner plate") without spooking them and is amazingly effective. http://www.flycarpin.com
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, McTage from Fly-Carpin. Today I am going to show you the drag and drop presentation. The drag and drop presentation is an awesome tool for catching carp. Its the best way I know of getting around the dinner plate paradox and what I call the dinner plate paradox is the fact that typically in order to catch a carp we need to present the fly very close to it's head. Umm but at the same time if you actually cast a fly within six inches of a carp's head when it hits the water the carp is going to spook and your not going to catch that fish anyways. So your kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. You gotta get the fly close but you can't get the fly close. So what do you do? You do the drag and drop presentation and the um the basic principal of it is really simple. Instead of casting directly to the carp you cast past the carp, draw the fly across the top of the water column until you get it where you want it, drop the rod tip then give it some slack and let the fly drop right in front of the carp. Like I said, it's really simple and um were going to show you some of the details right now. OK, so now some details about the drag and drop. First thing to understand is that it is much more of a lob cast than it is an overhand cast. Right now I am doing kindof a water drag. Boom. And I want just the fly to land. Because I don't really want my tippet to land on the water and scare the fish, thats the whole point of the drag and drop is to land away from the fish. So it's much more of a lob cast than it is an overhand cast. OK, so what that means is if we are looking from the side my rod has much more of an arcing pattern than it does a straight back and forth pattern for a classic overhand cast. OK, so if I am going to overhand cast, lets try and do it. I've got much more of an arcing pattern, more break in the wrist and just if I do that just my fly lands first. I am essentially lobbing the fly. That breaks down at distance. The further away you get the less you can lob it. It just doesn't work. That's part of why the drag and drop only works at close range. OK, so once again were gonna kindof lob the fly. Just the fly lands.
Lets see if I can do that from a little bit closer to show you. Lets do a close range drag and drop. So I am going to lob the fly, just the fly is going to land. Lob the fly, just the fly is going to land, drag it, drop it. OK, so I just put that in the 1 inch circle, OK, and at this range I can do that all night long. Lob it. Drag it. Drop it.
OK, now lets look at the same cast at about twenty four feet. At twenty four feet I can be really accurate with this cast. It is really effective, it works great.
Good.
Good.
Now lets get into some details about the drag and drop. One of them I would like to show you is the idea that because you have this step in the process where you are dragging the fly across the top of the water column there is nothing that says you have to drag that fly straight across the water column. If you happen to cast a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right and you are just a little bit off line you can easily correct that during the drag phase of the drag and drop. That means that you can correct for some minor errors in the earlier cast, and it really kind of de-sensitizes the whole process to being extremely perfectly accurate in terms of being on-line. So lets take a look.
The second detail that is helpfull is that just by it's nature, once you have completed the drag and drop and you have presented the fly, the fly has a little bit of slack on it. I am going to talk a about that a little bit in the next clip. ...