The roll cast pickup is worth practising hardest: it is the move that puts you back into a cast all day. Then rehearse the test order until it is boring.

What the instructor says

• Pickup first. “If your pickup’s not good or at least reasonable, then everything else starts to fall apart.”
• The pickup is a fishing tool. It lifts big flies and heavy lines out of the water: in fast water coming down at you, or from a drift boat after you pop the fly off the bank, it beats reaching out to strip slack.
• Same arc, tilted back and up. Keep the casting arc of a normal roll cast but tilt it back; with 45 feet of line out it saves the strip and the false casts.
• The fault that sinks candidates. They get nervous, pick up and cast with the line wrapped round the rod — “that’s absolute death.” Keep the 180-degree rule and watch the wind.
• In a test, don’t gamble. Nice pickup, a couple of false casts, lay it down.

Putting it to work

1. Practise in pieces. He does not practise the vertical-to-horizontal task (Task 7 on the exam form, Task 6 in the video) holistically — a hundred false casts at one plane before moving to the next — and the same piece-by-piece approach works for the roll casts.
2. Warm up with pickups at 45 feet, not false casts.
3. Check the wind and the line before every cast. A line near the rod means stop.

Source

From the FFI CI walkthrough series by Dayle Mazzarella (Chapter 3 — FFI Casting Instructor Certification Tasks, Fly Fishing Coach International), lesson 9, 00:09:45. See the video library and the task pages for the exam wording; terms follow the FFI Fly Casting Definitions.