A bad cast is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Work back to the error that produced it — a downward front trajectory is usually creep or inappropriate power, not a front-arc problem — and if the base is broken, rebuild it first.

What the instructor says

• Fixing the symptom keeps the tail. The caster compensates by opening the casting arc, so you see a downward front trajectory and they cannot cast far; change the front arc alone and they will have tails all day long. Ask what the root cause is, then go back to it.
• A broken base is the root cause. With a long-time caster, go back to the paintbrush drill, the line drill, pickup and lay down, false casting and the tip drills. The base has to be there or everything else falls apart, and it is a waste of time to change things when the fundamentals are messed up.
• Sometimes the fault is the platform. For a haul that runs into the leg, stand with the rod-side leg back — open, square and closed (sugar-foot) stances are the family, and he took his pick for the double haul from Joe Mahler.

Putting it to work

1. Name the symptom out loud.
2. Ask which upstream error produced it — the line, then the rod, then the hand is the order to look in.
3. Check the base drills and the stance before the stroke.

Source

From the FFI CI walkthrough series by Dayle Mazzarella (Chapter 3 — FFI Casting Instructor Certification Tasks, Fly Fishing Coach International), lesson 23, 00:01:03, 00:16:14 and 00:18:50. See the video library for the series and the CI exam section for the teaching tasks; terms follow the FFI Fly Casting Definitions.