HOOKED ON CASTING
Pittsburgh Casting Club is hosting a tournament featuring some of the world’s best fly casters
On weekday evenings and weekend mornings, Springdale’s Eddie Matuizek often can be found at Carnegie Lake in Highland Park, taking cast after cast after cast after cast with his fly-fishing rod. He never catches a fish. But that’s not the point. Ask him, as park visitors always do, what he’s doing, and he’ll tell you that he’s casting not to catch something but for accuracy and for distance. He’s likely to put the rod in your hand and have you try it, too.
And you could be the one he hooks — with his passion for competitive casting. Never heard of it? “This is a big European game — they play this like we play tennis!” he shouts excitedly from out on the low concrete piers at one end of the lake, as he roll casts the tiny white fly on the end of his fly-fishing line toward a handful of 30inch-diameter floating rings 25 to 50 feet away.
POP! Drop the fly in the target for a perfect score. Miss by a foot and the judge deducts a point. Miss by 2 feet and you lose 2 points. Aim for the next target. And so on.
In what the lingo calls the “5 WT. combo” — that is, five-weight fly line combination competition — competitors like him also will vie to see how far he or she can cast that nearly weightless fly. “When you’ve got wind like this, it makes it really difficult.”
There isn’t even a hook in the fly, or in the “bass bug” or any of the weights used in other games such as ¼- to ⅝- ounce plug accuracy, which often are done — with baitcasting, spincasting and spinning reels and rods — on land the length of two football fields.
As he puts it, “There’s no fishing involved here.”
Welcome to casting, a sport most people never have heard of, even though it has a rich tradition right here in Pittsburgh. Mr. Matuizek aims to bring it back. Hardly anyone knows that this little lake — on Lake Drive next to the Highland swimming pool and built in part with money from Andrew Carnegie in 1870 — was home to the Pittsburgh Casting Club. Clubs like it were very popular around the turn of the century, from San Francisco to New York, where casters competed inside Madison Square Garden. The Pittsburgh club, founded in 1924, hosted the 24th National Casting Championships in 1932.
In fact, the piers where you can find Mr. Matuizek on many nice evenings actually were built by the city, for $10,000, to competitive casting specs for the Pittsburgh Casting Club in the mid-1950s.
“I tell you, this is holy ground for casters,” says Mr. Matuizek as he walks the piers that stand in water that’s only a few feet deep. He dove much deeper into research as he set about to revive the Pittsburgh Casting Club, which seemed to die in the 1970s. He held the first meeting of the new club at the park’s Lake Point Shelter, just across Lake Drive from the water, at the end of May. Ten women and two men attended.
Next Saturday the club is hosting its first tournament there, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Says Mr. Matuizek, who is the club president, “I literally have the best casters in the world coming,” including probably the best ever, Steve Rajeff, a 14time world champion caster and 44-time American Casting Association grand all-around champion. He’ll be part of a demonstration for the public, too. More than two dozen are registered to compete.
The ACA (americancastingassoc.org)
is an association of 17 angling and casting clubs, including Pittsburgh’s. It sanctions casting competitions in North America and encourages interest in angling and casting. The sport isn’t booming, but it does appear to be, as Mr. Matuizek says, “holding on.” One nice sign of life is that one of its world champions is a 13-year-old named Maxine McCormick. Her champion coach, Chris Korich, is coming to the Pittsburgh weekend and holding a clinic for club members.
“It’s going to be great,” says Mr. Matuizek. He’s 52 and has been an avid angler for most of his life. It was on a family getaway/fishing trip to Erie about five years ago that he first read about casting as a sport of its own. He went to a competition in Connecticut and absolutely loved it.
It’s not hard for even beginner, or C-level, casters, whom he loves to encourage. “Most of us grew up with a fishing rod in our hands.” Many aficionados favor vintage gear, for reasons both practical and nostalgic.
Now he’s a B-level caster, scoring in the low 90s on scales of 100, but he’s working toward being A-level (94plus). That’s why he can be seen practicing so often at Carnegie Lake — seven nights a week before tournaments such as the Cincinnati Open that he’s in this weekend.
Last year, he won first place in the open class 5 WT. at the Mid Atlantic Fly Casting Championships and also took eighth in bass bug at the nationals. At the end of July, he’ll be competing at the 109th ACA National Casting Championships hosted by the Fly Casters of San Jose. (The West Coast is literally a hotbed for casting. Clubs in the Midwest and Northeast have to practice inside in the winter. Mr. Matuizek has lined up some tennis courts.)
At the San Jose gathering, he also plans to make a passionate pitch for Pittsburgh to host the nationals in 2019 or 2020, by which time he hopes many more people here will be aware of this sport and its hook-free charms.
“Right now, this is my life’s work,” says Mr. Matuizek, who is president of Allegheny Window Cleaning Inc. He has the flexibility, and a supportive wife, so he can spend so much time at Carnegie Lake, including picking up trash around the historic piers. He’s planning to use the former lake keeper’s building to store targets and other club gear, and hopes to work with the city to clean up the weeds that choke the wateraround the piers.
He loves to fish and, in fact, regularly goes on fishing trips to exotic locations such as Guatemala.
“I still like fishing more,” he says. “But competitive casting is a close second.”
The resurrected club’s new motto, with a nod to that of a pizza chain, is, “More casting, better fishing.”
You can hook up with the club on Facebook or by attending one of its meetings, held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on the last Thursday of the month through September, at the Lake Point Shelter.
Meanwhile, you also can meet champion caster Steve Rajeff at a meet-and-greet from 6 to 8 p.m. on June 9 at the International Angler store in Robinson (internationalangler.com).
Bob Batz Jr.: bbatz@postgazette.com, 412-263-1930 and on Twitter @bobbatzjr.