Echo Micro Practice rod
Brad Harris tightens his loops in his lounge room.
The party was getting a bit boring, so I’d skulked off to grab this funky new ‘teaching tool’ I’d been trying out. I wanted to show it to Chris, a mate who’s a fly fisho, so I knew I’d have at least one ally for my digressions.
I burst back into the room holding a tiny fly rod, just four feet long. It was threaded with a yellow rope, with about four feet of fluffy red wool tied to the end. “What the…?” was the obvious look on everyone’s faces. Chris’s eyes lit up, a childish grin settling on his face.
Within minutes, people were lining up to try the Echo Micro Practice Rod, an indoor fly rod developed by Tim Rajeff. While the uninitiated (or less enlightened) in the room thought it was a toy, it’s actually a very realistic simulation of how a full-size fly rod feels. The rope has enough weight to load the chopstick-thin blank, and the wool ‘leader’ slows the line down enough to allow the cast to loop and turn over.
The ‘line’ even has enough friction on carpet to do roll casts, and within about 15 minutes I had my 13 year-old brother-in-law doing roll, accelerated roll, and spey casts. Meanwhile, everybody else was doing the ‘Hey-you’ll-put-someone’s-eye-out’ dance.
Chris had a go and realised that his casting was okay, but needed some work, especially at distance. Casting a full line on this rod requires the same amount of effort, timing and line speed as a 9-footer, even though you’re only casting about 10 metres. In fact it exaggerates any errors. To make things harder, the coarseness of the rope means you can’t double haul or shoot line, so you really need to work the blank. With the help of the highly visible line, I found my loops improving within minutes. My next casting session with a ‘real’ rod showed the benefits.
Peter Hayes says it’s one of the best tools he’s ever seen to learn the art of fly casting. Coming from one of Australia’s leading instructors, that’s a pretty good endorsement!
The practice rods are available from Peter for about $65. Call him on 0409 944 699