Wind is not an exception to fly fishing conditions. On most water worth fishing, wind is the condition, and an angler who can only cast on a still evening is an angler who fishes about twelve days a year.
The good news is that wind is four different problems rather than one, and each has a specific answer. The bad news is that one of the four can put a hook in your face, so we will deal with that one first.
The dangerous one
Wind blowing from your casting-arm side is the hazard. It takes the line and the fly and pushes them across your body, which is exactly where your head is.
Right-handed caster with a wind from the right, left-handed caster with a wind from the left. That is the setup, and the outcome is a hook in an ear, a cheek or an eye. It is the most common serious injury in fly fishing and it is entirely preventable.
There are four ways out and you should know all of them.
Cast backhanded, bringing the rod across your body so the cast happens over your non-dominant shoulder. The line then travels on the downwind side of you. This is the standard answer and it is worth practicing before you need it, because a backhand cast learned in an emergency is a bad backhand cast.
Turn around and deliver on your back cast. Face away from the target, make what would be your forward cast in the wrong direction, and present with the stroke that used to be your back cast. It feels absurd and it works perfectly.
Tilt the rod over, casting in a plane angled away from your body, so the line travels out to the downwind side even on a normal stroke. Enough for a moderate wind, not enough for a strong one.
Or move. Change which bank you are on, reposition the boat, or fish a different stretch. Nobody gets a prize for casting into a hazard when walking a hundred yards would have removed it.
Wear polarized glasses regardless, every time, in any wind. They are eye protection that happens to help you see fish.
ORVIS Fly Casting Lessons: Casting in the WindWind in your face
The one everyone thinks of, and the most straightforward.
Your forward cast is fighting the wind and your back cast is being helped by it. So you invert the normal geometry: throw the back cast high and the forward cast low.
Aim the forward delivery down at the water, or even slightly below the surface if that helps you commit to it. A cast driven low stays under the worst of the wind, which is always strongest a few feet up.
Tighten the loop. Wind punishes a wide loop disproportionately, because a wide loop presents a lot of line surface to the air. A tight loop is aerodynamically far better and it is the single biggest improvement available.
Add line speed, which means the double haul. This is the situation the haul exists for, and an angler with a reliable haul simply does not have the problem an angler without one has.
And accept a shorter cast. Wind makes distance expensive, and thirty feet delivered properly beats fifty feet attempted and collapsed. Get closer instead.
Wind at your back
Less obvious and it catches people out, because the wind is helping the part of the cast they are looking at and wrecking the part they are not.
Your back cast is now fighting the wind. It collapses, falls, and the forward cast begins with a pile of slack behind you. The forward delivery then feels weak no matter how hard you push.
The fix inverts the previous one. Drive the back cast low and hard, keeping it under the wind, then make the forward cast high and let the wind carry it out. A tailwind will do a great deal of your work if you give it a high delivery to work with.
Aiming high also means the line lands with slack in it, which is often exactly what you want, and is the same effect described in reach and curve casts.
Watch for the fly landing in a heap, though. A strong tailwind can outrun your leader and dump everything, so a slightly firmer stop and a shorter leader help.
Wind from your off side
The easy one, and worth naming so you recognize your good fortune.
Wind from your non-casting side blows the line and fly away from your body. There is no hazard, the plane of the cast is naturally held open, and you can more or less cast normally.
The only adjustment is drift: the wind will push your delivery downwind of where you aimed, so aim upwind of the target by an amount you learn by watching the first couple of casts.
Casting In Strong Wind: Andy Mill Two Minute MasterclassWhat changes about the rig
Casting technique is most of it, but the rig makes a real difference and it is easier to change.
Shorten the leader. A long fine leader is the first thing wind destroys, because there is not enough mass at the end to turn it over. Cut back to something shorter and step up the tippet a size. You lose some subtlety and gain a fly that actually arrives.
Consider a heavier line or a rod one weight up. Mass carries through wind. There is a reason saltwater rods are heavier than the fish strictly require.
Trim the fly. A big wind-resistant dry fly or a bulky streamer acts as a sail on the end of your leader, and switching to something slimmer and denser transforms the cast.
Cut down on false casts. Every false cast is another second for the wind to act on your line, and a strong breeze rewards a cast picked up and delivered with a single stroke. This is another place a haul pays, since it lets you get line out with fewer motions.
The mistake everyone makes
There is one reflex that ruins more casts in wind than every technical fault combined, and it is worth isolating.
When a cast fails in wind, people push harder.
It is entirely natural and it makes things worse in a specific way. Extra effort applied to the casting stroke, rather than to the stop, opens the loop. A wider loop presents more line surface to the air, catches more wind, and slows down faster. So the harder you push, the more the wind gets to work with, and the shorter the cast becomes.
The correct response to a cast dying in wind is almost always the opposite: smoother acceleration, a crisper stop, a narrower loop, and speed supplied by the line hand rather than the rod arm. It feels like doing less and it goes further.
You can test this on any windy afternoon. Make a deliberately gentle, precise cast with a tight loop, then make an angry one with everything you have. The gentle one usually wins, and once you have seen that a few times the instinct to muscle it starts to fade.
Reading wind on the water
Wind is not uniform, and the anglers who fish windy days well are mostly the ones who noticed that.
It funnels along valleys and accelerates through gaps, so a river bend can be sheltered while the straight above it is unfishable. It drops in the lee of timber, banks, bluffs and islands, sometimes leaving a band of calm water twenty yards wide against a windward shore.
It also has a daily rhythm in most of the country: mornings are frequently calm, wind builds through the middle of the day as the ground heats, and it often drops again in the last hour of light. Planning a day around that costs nothing and changes what is possible.
The practical version: before deciding a day is unfishable, walk. Look for the sheltered bank, the inside of the bend, the stretch below the timber. Very often there is fishable water within a few hundred yards, and everybody else has already gone home.
Wind is also good for you
It is worth saying, because the framing so far has been entirely defensive.
Wind puts a chop on the surface, and chop breaks up the window through which a fish sees the world. Fish that would refuse everything on a flat calm afternoon feed confidently in a ripple, and they are far less likely to notice you, your line or a slightly clumsy delivery.
Wind also delivers food. Terrestrial insects get blown onto the water, and a windy bank with trees above it is one of the most reliable places to find fish looking up in late summer. On a lake, wind pushes plankton and then baitfish into a downwind shoreline and the predators follow.
So the correct attitude is not to hope for calm. It is to have the casting tools to fish a windy day, and then to prefer one.
Presentation changes too
Casting gets the fly out there. Wind then goes on interfering with everything that happens next, and the second half is less discussed.
A bow of line on the water catches wind the same way a sail does, and it drags the fly just as the current would. On a lake, where there is no current at all, wind-induced drag is the only drag there is, and it is why a dry fly on a windy pond skates without any obvious cause.
The answers are the familiar ones applied to a new source. Keep less line on the water. Keep the rod tip low, right down at the surface, so the wind has less line to push. Mend against the wind rather than only against the current. And on still water, consider fishing downwind so the wind is straightening your line rather than bowing it.
There is an upside worth exploiting too. On a lake, a steady wind creates a surface drift, and a fly cast across it will be carried along at the speed of the surface layer, which is a perfectly natural drift you did not have to work for. Anglers who understand that stop fighting the wind and start using it as a conveyor.
Where it is not optional
Saltwater fly fishing is wind fishing, effectively always. Bonefish on a flat, tarpon in a channel and striped bass along a beach are all fished in a breeze most days of the year, and an angler without a haul and a backhand cast is simply out of the game.
Big western rivers and reservoirs run windy through the afternoon almost every day in summer, which is why so many people fish them early and quit at eleven.
And any boat, anywhere. On a boat you frequently cannot change your position relative to the wind, cannot walk to the other bank, and are casting from a platform with somebody else on it. The backhand cast is not an advanced option there, it is basic equipment.
The gear
Polarized glasses, listed first for a reason. They are eye protection, and wind is when you need it.
A hat with a brim, which stops a hook that would otherwise reach your scalp or forehead and costs nothing.
A shorter, heavier leader for windy days, or the scissors and spare tippet to make one on the bank.
A line one weight heavier than the rod is rated for, if you fish wind constantly. It loads faster and carries better, at some cost in delicacy you were not getting in a gale anyway.
Slimmer flies. A box with a few dense, low-profile patterns in it will save more windy days than any casting tip.
A stripping basket in salt water or from a boat, because wind will take loose line off a deck and wrap it around everything on board.
And practice at a backhand cast, which is free and which almost nobody does until the day they need it and discover they cannot.
The short version
Four winds, four answers. From your casting side is the dangerous one: cast backhanded, turn around and deliver on the back cast, tilt the plane, or move. From in front, throw the back cast high and the forward cast low, tighten the loop and haul. From behind, drive the back cast low and let a high forward cast ride the wind. From your off side, aim upwind and enjoy it.
Shorten the leader, slim the fly, cut the false casts, and get closer rather than casting further.
And wear the glasses. Every time, in any wind, no exceptions.
The larger point is that wind separates anglers more sharply than almost anything else. Two people with the same rod and the same flies will have completely different days at fifteen knots, and the difference is not strength. It is a tight loop, a working haul, a backhand cast that already exists, and the willingness to walk to the sheltered bank instead of standing in the open getting frustrated. All four are free, and three of them can be practiced on a lawn before the season starts.
