A tight loop is narrow, pointed and travels fast. A wide loop is round, slow and lands softly. Neither is better in the abstract — the exam asks for both — but almost everyone wants tighter, because a tight loop cuts wind and carries distance.

The two levers

1. Tip path. The loop is a mirror of what the rod tip did. If the tip tracks in a straight line, the top and bottom legs stay parallel and the loop is tight. Dip the tip and the legs converge into a tail; arc the tip and the loop opens.

2. The angle between the legs. Hold the rod still at the end of the stroke and the legs stay close together. That angle is set by the stop, not by the speed of the stroke. A hard stop with a small arc gives the tightest loop.

What opens a loop

• Wide arc. More rod rotation means the tip travels further round a curve, so the legs spread.
• Late stop / soft stop. Letting the rod drift forward after the stop opens the loop and costs you distance.
• Too much line for the arc. The line cannot keep up with the tip, so the loop balloons.
• A soft, slow stroke. Without enough acceleration the rod never loads properly, and an unloaded rod cannot turn a stroke into line speed.

Practical recipe

For a tight loop: take the shortest arc that still lets the rod bend, accelerate smoothly to a hard stop, and keep the line hand quiet. Introduce hauling only after the loop is already tight without it — see The Double Haul for that sequence.

For a wide, soft loop (useful for delicate dry-fly work and for the teaching tasks): open the arc, ease the stop, and let the rod do less work.

The vocabulary for all of this — loop, fly leg, rod leg, casting arc, casting stroke — is defined on the FFI Fly Casting Definitions page, and those are the terms an examiner will use.