Welcome to another installment of "Ask an Orvis Fly-Fishing Instructor," with Peter Kutzer. In this episode, Peter explains the differences between the parachute cast and the pile cast, both of which are slack-line casts that can be useful when you're fishing across conflicting currents or to a fish downstream. To make a parachute cast, you stop the rod high and keep the tip up while the fly and front of the line land on the water. This gives you a belly of line between the rod tip and the water. As your fly drifts downstream, you lower the rod tip, feeding line into the drift and maintaining contact with the fly. To make a pile cast, you shoot the line high again, but this time, you drop the rod tip to the water's surface in front of the fly, dragging the line downward. This causes the line to land in a pile, so the fly can dead-drift freely.

This week we do a podcast I've been looking forward to--an interview with a couple of top fly-fishing guides about what it's like to be a guide and how to get into guiding. Learn about how a guide prepares for their day, what they agonize over, and enjoy a few wild stories along the way.

In this week's podcast I announce the winner of the Podcast Suggestion Contest, who won a signed copy of my latest book Essential American Flies.  The topic is sure to be a crowd-pleaser to most of you--targeting bigger trout. In the podcast I give you 10 suggestions for targeting the biggest trout in a pool or in a stretch of river. 

There were lots of great suggestions in the podcast contest, and I used a couple for the short Fly Box section at the beginning of the podcast:  How to cure the fall blues after a tough fishing season, and how to pack for a business trip where you might grab a few hours fishing.  Plus a terrific tip on rigging dry droppers on our podcast request line from a listener in Georgia.

This week I interview George Daniel, past competitor in Team Fly Fishing USA and now head coach. The subject is European nymphing styles like Czech nymphing, Polish nymphing, French nymphing, and Spanish nymphing.

I've had a number of requests to talk about European nymphing so I called in one of the top American experts on these techniques. You'll learn the differences between these styles and under which conditions you use them, as well as how to rig for these very effective styles of catching trout and grayling on nymphs. These techniques are great to have in your bag of tricks when standard strike indicator and dry/dropper techniques aren't working.