The roll cast: A basic fly-fishing cast for tight spots
Whether it's the first cast you learn or the second, the roll cast is a hard-working and versatile arrow in your casting quiver.
Inside this lesson
- Why roll cast?
- Waterborne casts and anchors
- Basic roll cast mechanics
- The D-loop
- Variations on roll cast mechanics
- Common roll cast problems and troubleshooting
- Essential equipment to practice your roll casts
- The Belgian cast
- Advanced applications
- Additional resources
If you're an absolute beginning fly caster, the roll cast might be the most valuable cast you can learn to get you out and fly-fishing immediately. It's less complex than an overhead cast, requiring a step or so fewer in the process, but can get you started just fine.
It's a little less versatile, so it won't serve you in every fishing situation, but if you're setting up on the edge of a pond or a river, it works great.
Why roll cast?
The beauty of the roll cast is it lets you to cast effectively when there's no room for a back cast. When you've got trees or thick brush behind you, or you're fishing from a cramped bank, the roll cast will be your weapon of choice.
The roll cast also forms the foundation for many advanced two-handed spey casting techniques, and has great utility functions in laying fly line in front of you to start an overhead cast, or lifting a sunken fly line at the end of a drift.
💡 Key Point
The roll cast isn't just a backup cast. For many anglers, it becomes their primary casting technique in brushy streams and rivers.
Waterborne casts and anchors
The roll cast belongs to a family of fly-fishing casts known as a "waterborne" casts. Meaning the cast is initiated with the line on the water.
This is the opposite to a standard fly cast (an overhead cast); it's not airborne. With an overhead cast, you create line speed off the water with the pickup, yes, and then your arm, as expressed in forming the overhead loop, is what loads the rod, adds energy, and puts a bend into it.
With a roll cast, along with its cousins in the two-handed and Spey casting world, we're using the surface tension between the line / leader and the water's surface to load the road, and put the energy into it, that ultimately results in the cast going forward.
🧠 Remember
To execute a proper roll cast, you need surface tension to load the rod.
In these waterborne casts, parts of our fly line and leader become an "anchor," meaning the surface tension between water and line does most of the work to load the rod.
Much of what we are mindful of, mechanically, in the roll cast is "setting the anchor." We want our lines positioned properly, to then transfer energy most efficiently.
Take a look at this excellent excerpt from Epic's "Casts That Catch Fish" video series, wherein its founder and casting instructor Carl McNeil describes the roll cast:
I strongly recommend the whole "Casts That Catch Fish" video, it's a great casting resource.
Basic roll cast mechanics
The roll cast combines three separate movements into one smooth motion.
- Begin with the lift and sweep.
Starting with your rod tip low to the water and your line straight in front of you, lift your rod tip while you swing it up to your shoulder in a slow arc. This lift should be deliberate, allowing the water to continue anchor your line, even as you pull it toward you and sweep it upward. - Form the D-loop.
As you lift your rod tip up and around to about the 2 o'clock position behind your shoulder, you'll form a D-loop behind you and below your rod. This helps create the stored energy for your roll cast. Be mindful of the shape and position of this loop. Your rod tip should go as far behind you as conditions (e.g. bushes) allow and your hand should be just below the level of your shoulder. - Execute a forward cast.
A forward stroke completes the cast, bringing the rod tip straight ahead, with a smooth acceleration dead-straight to about 9 o'clock. This should feel very close to the forward stroke on your traditional overhead cast. But unlike the basic overhead cast, there's no pause between the back cast (in our case, setting the D-loop at Step 2) and the forward cast. Once you've formed your D-loop, the roll cast flows in one continuous motion. The key is your line and leader maintaining contact with the water surface throughout the cast, with the tension helping form your D-loop and loading your rod in the forward cast.
The D-loop
Think of Step 2, forming the D-loop, like drawing a bow. The more smoothly you pull back and form the loop, the more efficiently the energy releases.
The D-loop forms behind your rod as a curved shape, anchored to the water's surface at one end (the bottom of the letter D) and your rod tip at the other (the top). This curved shape creates the tension that loads your rod.
Your rod tip should be in a slight bend as you finish forming the D-loop, allowing the line to settle into position naturally. This loading phase determines the success of your cast, and the path your rod takes is one key component of the cast to practice. A well-formed D-loop means a smooth, powerful roll cast, while a poorly formed one leads to collapsed casts and tangled leaders.
Paul Arden
A good D-loop has a couple important components:
- Clear anchor point on the water
- A slight curve in the line from the anchor to rod (the bow of the D)
- Slight bend in the rod at the rod tip
Variations on roll cast mechanics
There are a couple things you can tweak to make roll casts work differently. This is largely up to personal taste and style.
Hand height
Hand position, chiefly height in relation to the shoulder, is probably the biggest stylistic tweak in the roll cast.
Teachers like Lefty Kreh suggest keeping the hand lower, below the shoulder. Joan Wulff taught the roll cast with the hand up around eye level.
Find out what works for you by feel, and be conscious of your hand position relative to your shoulder.
Remember, what matters most in all fly casting is the path your rod tip takes. Where goes the rod tip, goes the fly line, goes the fly.
Chop, or forward?
If you have a high hand, like Wulff taught, the forward motion of a roll cast can be considered more like an abrupt chop. She also used the metaphor of using a hatchet or tenderizing meat to describe the forward motion.
If your hand is below the shoulder, that chop will send your rod tip too low, and result in a cast that collapses.
When accuracy is really important for me with a roll cast, I tend to use the high-hand method Wulff taught. One cool thing about this way of roll casting is you can use your elbow to help sight the area you want your fly to go.
As Wulff writes in "Joan Wulff's Fly-Casting Accuracy":
To be accurate, line your elbow up with the particular inch of water on which you wish to present your fly. Keep your arm bent as you start the thumb pad on its hand/target path, lowering your elbow. When the shaft is perpendicular to the target inch, power-snap forward.
The elbow lowers and moves back under the shoulder. If you wish to unroll the line above the water, perhaps to present a dry fly, stay on the hand/target line. With a long tippet that you wish to pile up, aim above the hand/target line. It's yours to determine.
Common roll cast problems and troubleshooting
Here's a couple things that can go wrong with a roll cast.
Collapsed casts
When your line falls in a heap instead of rolling out smoothly, one of two things has probably happened: You've either lost water tension, or rushed your forward cast.
Make sure your anchor (the bottom part of your D-loop) stays connected to the water, and you've formed the D-loop effectively before starting your forward stroke.
Weak presentations
If your cast doesn't have much oomph, that's usually also stemming from one of two things:
- A poorly-formed D-loop and / or
- Rushing or punching the forward stroke.
Take time to build your D-loop, and focus on smooth acceleration across the entire forward motion. Acceleration, like with most fly casting, needs to come over time, with the greatest acceleration at the end of the stroke.
Think of lining up and delivering a high-five, rather than throwing a jab. You've visualized your target, are tracking toward it, and you turn up the volume right at the end. Power comes from good technique and setting up for success, not sheer force.
Tangled line or leader
Another important casting concept that comes into play in the roll cast is your "casting plane". By that we (mostly) mean the horizontal angle at which you hold the rod relative to your body.
A completely vertical casting plane, in the roll cast, would cause problems, because as you accelerate from Step 2 to Step 3, your D-loop would crash into your rod.
So our casting plane for the roll cast is slightly off vertical, angled outward, with your elbow tucked to your side.
We can vary the side from which we roll cast, but it's more challenging to vary the casting plane and make a more horizontal roll cast.
For example, if you're a right-handed caster, and you've got an obstruction, something like a big bush, immediately behind you, you can execute a roll cast off your opposite shoulder, in a back-handed (sometimes known as cack-handed) configuration.
You'll replicate on the same not-quite-vertical casting plane, but instead of tucking your casting arm elbow into your torso, you'll extend it out 6-12" from your side.
That slight shift will orient the rod tip over the shoulder opposite your rod hand (your left shoulder, if you're a rightie) and allow you do perform the cast in a different configuration. Left-handed casters, reverse things.
Essential equipment to practice your roll casts
- Rod, reel, and line
- Open water or grassy area
- Practice leader / grass leader
You need your fly rod, if that wasn't readily apparent. And it'll be easier to learn to roll cast on water with a floating line than a sinking line.
But one thing that may be new is this "grass leader". A grass leader is a useful tool you can make at home that'll help emulate water conditions if you're practicing your roll cast on grass.
How to tie a grass leader to practice roll casting
If you're going to be practicing roll casts on grass, get a spool of decent-sized leader material (20# Maxima works great) and cut yourself five or six 18" sections. Tie them together with triple surgeon's loops, but aim to leave the tag ends of each section hanging off a good 1/4".
When you're done, you'll have a stiff leader about 7.5' long that will grab the grass and create the necessary friction as you execute the cast, emulating the surface tension of water.
A grass leader lets you practice the mechanics of a roll cast, or any anchored cast, even when you're away from water. If you're planning on using a grass leader to practice your two-handed spey casts, you might want to make it slightly longer in total length, or use a stiffer base material (up to #30 test) but it probably won't make a huge difference.
Here's a video showing one way to get a grass leader done:
Advanced applications
A roll cast can be used to lift a sunken fly line or nymphing rig without the agitation or popping a speedy traditional lift can cause.
When we teach the lift to initiate the overhead cast, it's emphasized that we lift slowly enough to avoid any spray or that sssziiip sound that happens when we lift the line off the water quickly. This becomes a bit more challenging with larger flies, and sinking lines. So use a roll cast when you want to line reposition your line quietly and carefully.
The Belgian cast
The Belgian cast, or oval cast, is a slight modification of the roll cast. Many fly anglers naturally come to the Belgian cast as a method to get their fly line in front of them to start to execute an overhead cast, or a roll cast.
The Belgian cast in its more advanced form will ultimately be useful when you're casting heavy flies, shooting heads, or contending with extreme wind directly into your casting shoulder side that would push your flies into your body, but for simplicity's sake many beginners find themselves employing the Belgian cast as a sort of semi-roll cast to get their fly out, to set up another cast.
The Belgian cast is essentially a roll cast without the formation of the D-loop, wherein the casting plane stays almost horizontal as you pull your fly line through the water. You then swing your rod tip around in a continuous motion at around 3/4 of vertical and deliver in front of you. Here's more on the Belgian cast:
Additional resources
Fly-Fishers International, the governing body that organizes the main fly-fishing casting instructors certification, has a whole series of material on casting success, including roll casting. Their videos are solid as well:
And while when it comes to casting, video instruction is my favorite, books aren't bad either. Here's a good one.
Even in book form, Lefty is one of the world's best fly-fishing teachers. In this slim volume he spells out several dozen casting flaws and tips fix them. He touches on multiple roll cast variations, including an elevated roll cast, long-distance roll cast, aerial roll cast, a side roll cast, dump roll cast, and more.
And, one more, from the queen herself:
Roll on, roll casters
That's it! The roll cast is a great cast to have in your pocket, whether or not it's your primary.
Subscribers, let us know in the comments how it's working for you.
When do you use a roll cast?
- What do you like about it, compared with the overhead cast?
- What's the trickiest part of executing a roll cast?
