However, we are obviously getting ahead of ourselves here. Finding and casting to the tarpon is not exactly easy. A good guide will put you on tarpon, so your work starts at spotting the fish your guide is yelling about. This is where you recognize why people will pay $200 for a pair of quality polarized sunglasses. Don't forget them or have your Smiths stolen two weeks before the trip. You WILL be kicking yourself if you do. Also, practice identifying distances quickly, because the tarpon isn't going to wait for you to find it. It's going to keep moving and all of a sudden the 40' chip shot at 10 o'clock becomes a 90' cast at 1 o'clock and you give your guide a new piercing. Casting backhand doesn't exist on the trout stream, right? Casting a size 14 Hendrickson on a 4wt to a 'distant' rising trout is no comparison to throwing, well, anything on a 12wt to a legitimately distant tarpon either. This is before having to consider that the instant the fly lands it needs to be moving to entice the target, rather than simply drifting along a given feeding lane. When one considers that the best opportunity of an entire tarpon trip may be the first shot on the first day, warm-ups and blown casts are not great options. Casting practice with the 12wt or even a casting lesson prior to a tarpon trip is not a bad idea. Coming from dry fly season and pond bass in WNY was poor preparation, and the not-so-quiet voice from the casting platform made sure I knew it. He isn't yelling though. He just wants to make sure I hear him. Turns out 18' and the silence of rejection don't do much to damper instruction and encouragement hidden in bursts of profanity.
Remember that string of three hundred tarpon? The shaking knees? That whole affair ended with what was building up to be a perfectly acceptable cast. Which died because I cast the rod tip. The physics of casting a 12wt all day had caused the rod sections to wiggle loose. This meant that what should have been a cast to a string of tarpon that held at least one eater ended up dropping a rod section on to those fish. This, of course, was followed by more expletives.