About CastLab

CastLab is built by a small team of anglers with day jobs in the software industry, led by me, Matthew Wright. I'm a U.S. Army veteran, a lifelong angler, and a product leader who spent years building async video software at Microsoft.

The idea for CastLab came after attending a daylong spey casting clinic with Dec Hogan, hosted by Dave McCoy at Emerald Water Anglers in Seattle. That day, Dec said something that stuck with me: "We'll watch you make a few casts, and then we'll come tell you what's going on. You might think you know what's going on. But trust me, you don't. We'll tell you what corrections to make."

The clinic was invaluable. But the next weekend, when I headed back to the water to practice what I'd learned, my line kept landing in a puddle. I needed more coaching, but my instructor had flown home.

In his book A Passion for Steelhead, Dec wrote: "All the various approaches to spey casting are based upon the same principles of rod motion and line manipulation in order to make a cast. The physics behind this is not unlike throwing a football, hitting a golf ball, or swinging a baseball bat."

That got me thinking. Golf has dozens of apps for remote swing analysis: coaches and students exchanging videos, markup, and feedback asynchronously. But nothing like that existed specifically for fly casting.

So we built it.