Winter Practice

I've been meaning to practice pitching this winter, and though the cold is enough to keep me out of my garage (forget going outside!) I finally put in an hour today. I'm fairly new to baitcasters, yet I feel pretty comfortable with thumbing the spool during casting. I think I finally realized the difference in using the thumb when pitching, and the truth is that I am nowhere near as good at it as I thought. I know I'll never be a Tommy Biffle or Denny Brauer, but for my needs I thought I was well on my way. At any rate, it got me to thinking about just how to learn to pitch well. The answer came from watching other pros do it. When you see guys who are good at pitching you notice that a lot of the skill comes at the very end of the pitch, as the lures falls into the water. This may sound pretty basic, since the obvious goal is to let the lure fall in without any disturbance. Yet it involves training your thumb in a totally different manner than when you're casting. A lot of guys, when they pitch, tend to pull back slightly on the rod as the lure finishes its arc and enters the water. This obviously slows the lure down even more than if you let it fall freely, thus letting it just drop silently into the water. This is much easier said than done, and I found out that the lesson is best learned (for me, at least) a few steps at a time. First, I felt like I really had to train my thumb to stop a lure from a simple stand-still, vertical spot, without moving it forward. If you read a lot of basics about how to use baitcasters you'll notice they all say this is the most important part, and while this is true I also found that they don't say anything about the trick of pulling back on the rod. So I decided to learn that, from that vertical position. With my thumb on the spool, I let the lure drop, then as it was nearing the ground, I pulled back slightly on the rod so that it would slow down and I could control just how hard it hit the ground. After doing this for a while I also noticed that one of the keys was to have more than just the tip of your thumb on the spool. I felt like I had more control with the entire last joint of my thumb on the spool, so that more skin was in contact with the line and less pressure was needed to slow the lure down. As I would pull back on the rod I didn't need to apply more pressure to the spool--the backward motion of the rod along with the light but constant pressure of my thumb naturally slowed the lure down. All this coordination of different movements is what makes pitching so hard, but as I found out it really is only one movement with the other action of the thumb being a constant. The second part of learning to pitch well, to me, will be making the lure swing forward as it falls and learning to control its speed as it falls both forward and downward. I was trying to learn it all at once and it wasn't working, so I figured this would make matters much easier. Then, after that, accuracy will be the next lesson, and, finally, distance. I think breaking the technique down into these smaller lessons makes it a lot easier and less frustrating.