Although he has won the annual American Casting Association (ACA) championship 34 consecutive times, and the bi-annual World Casting Championship 13 times, the largest crowd Steve Rajeff ever cast in front of was at a promotional stunt one hour before the start of a Professional Golf Association tournament. Rajeff was to compete against long-ball hitter Fred Couples to see who could send a golf ball farther.

At the time, Rajeff's employer made shafts for golf clubs and he was introduced as "a fisherman from G. Loomis." Lee Travino confided to the other PGA players that his money was on Couples. Couples went first, and drove the ball a measured 333 yards straight down the fairway.

Rajeff had rigged an 11-foot surf rod with 30-pound-test line knotted around the reel arbor. He twisted a ring-eye screw into a golf ball, and practiced snapping the line with the force of the cast, sending the ball off as if from a slingshot. He had made practice casts into a lake this way, and although he knew the ball was going at least 250 yards, he didn't know if he could beat Couples' drive of 333 yards.

On a cast with a surf rod, the lure travels in a 360-degree arc before being sent to its destination, and on his warm-up swing, Rajeff underestimated the closeness of the PGA players who were crowded around to watch. "I almost took out the whole PGA tour when I whistled the ball past their noses," Rajeff said later.

After asking the players to move back, Rajeff wound up and launched the ball 337 yards--which beat Couples' single attempt by 4 yards. When asked if this was an important victory, Rajeff just laughed and said, "I was just happy I didn't kill anybody. Not all my practice attempts went as straight as that one."

Who is this master caster who can jury-rig a golf ball, and cast it farther with a fishing rod than a champion professional golfer? You'd think his name would be as well known amongst fishermen as Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Dale Earnhardt, or Garry Kasparov-but it isn't.

Rajeff won his first ACA tournament in 1972 when he was 15 years old and has won or tied the All-Around Championship 34 consecutive years including most recently in August 2004. This gives him possibly the longest winning streak in amateur competitive sport. For good measure, he also owns the U.S. record in every distance event.

Steve Rajeff (right) tied Henry Mittel for the All-Around Championship of the American Casting Association's national tournament held August 3-7 in Lexington Kentucky. Rajeff has either won or tied the U.S. All-Round Championship title 34 consecutive years in a row.

In the international arena, he won the All-Around World Champion title in 1973 when as a 16-year-old he made the trip to Scarborough, England, just to "learn the ropes" and won 7 of 11 events. He has since won the International Casting Sport Federation's (ICSF) World Championship (held every two years) 13 times—more than any other person in ICSF history.

At the World Championships Sept. 7-11, 2004, in Bern, Switzerland, Rajeff, Henry Mittel, Ed Lanser, Jay Clark, and Sam Davis represented the U.S. Rajeff took third place behind Heinz Maire-Hensage (first place) and Jens Nagel, both of Germany.

Chris Korich, who has competed against Rajeff at the national level and teamed with Rajeff to represent the U.S. at international competitions, says, "Rajeff is the greatest all-around caster in the history of the sport. I can't think of another athlete in any other sport who has achieved so many national and world championships. In terms of longevity and consistency, he is incomparable."
 

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Recreational golfers don't play for money or fame but they appreciate the finely honed swing of their favorite professional players. Tournament casters don't enter the field of competition for fame or money (the national and international casting events have no prize money and little media coverage) but there is much to learn from someone who has spent a lifetime discovering how accurate you can be with a 9-foot fly rod, or how far you can cast a 10-weight fly line.

Rajeff has been called the Babe Ruth of fly casting. You might agree with that, except that Rajeff rarely strikes out. Certainly he is the best caster in the world, and every fisherman who studies and practices his casting technique, will catch more fish, or at least derive more enjoyment from the sport.

Tournament Casting

The all-around champion title is bestowed on the caster with the most points across all events--both fly casting and with conventional tackle. In the American tournament, there are three fly-casting and three plug-casting accuracy events and three fly-casting and three plug-casting distance events. Not only has Rajeff scored the highest number of combined points in every tournament for the last 34 years, he has also won every individual event at least once. He has no Achilles heel.

Tournament casters have specialized tackle for distance events but the accuracy competitions are "fishing tackle events" where casters use standard rods. Rajeff uses the same 9-foot 6-weight GLX for accuracy competitions that many anglers use while fishing.

In the Anglers' Fly Distance event, casters are limited to a 9-foot rod and a shooting taper line with a maximum head length of 31 feet and maximum grain weight of 310 grains (10-weight). The tackle is somewhat specialized but similar to what a Northwest steelheader might use on the Sauk, Skagit, or large rivers of British Columbia. Rajeff holds the U.S. record for this event with a distance of 190 feet.

In the Single-handed Fly Distance event, heavier artillery is allowed with up to a 9'9" rod (specialized rods and blanks are normally used), a minimum shooting taper head length of 49' 3", and maximum line weight of 650 grains. Rajeff holds the U.S. record for this event at 238 feet. What he calls his lifetime best cast was in this event at a competition in South Africa where he launched a cast of 248 feet. However, international rules disallow a cast if wind speed near the time of the cast exceeds 8 mph in any direction and the cast was never recorded.

The Two-handed Fly Distance event allows rods up to 17 feet long, shooting taper lines with a minimum head length of 49' 3", and a maximum weight of 1850 grains. Rajeff owns the U.S. record of 295 feet in this event, and has held records in every international distance event as well. [For more information on American Casting Association rules and regulations, visit www.americancastingassoc.org/. The Editor.]

Kovich says Rajeff's greatest asset is his ability to focus. "This guy is in the zone 24/7 during a competition. He has the focus of Joe Montana with two minutes left to go in the Superbowl and he has the brawn and strength of Steve Young to see him through.

"It's obvious to everyone who watches him--even people who don't fly cast--that Steve is like a robot or a casting machine when he competes. He throws perfect casts every time. Think 'Terminator' and that's exactly Steve Rajeff when his is in the box. He is the casting Terminator."

Despite all this, Rajeff gets no recognition from mainstream media, and little acknowledgment from regular fly fishers who could learn from the world's most proficient caster. They mistakenly believe that Rajeff and others of his ilk are not real fishermen, and that what competitive casters do at concrete casting ponds backed by bleacher seating bears little relation to the hazards of a trout stream. What they don't know is that it was a trout stream that caused Rajeff to hone his casting skills in the first place.

Rajeff was nine years old and recently returned from a family vacation in the Sierras when he first stopped by the Golden Gate Casting Club. He had fished a mountain stream with a fiberglass rod and push-button reel, and while he had little to show for his efforts, he saw several fly fishermen seemingly catching fish at will.

The Golden Gate Casting Club was only a five-minute bicycle ride from his parents' home in San Francisco, and the young Rajeff decided he could learn to fly cast there, and then catch those trout in the Sierras the following summer. On one of his early visits, a club old-timer yelled at Rajeff: "Kid, stop! You are going to break your rod tip if you keep casting like that." Rajeff's rod tip was hitting the cement behind him on every back cast. Although Rajeff ended up the world's most successful competitive caster, he started off as poorly as everyone else.

Steve Rajeff (above) is known as a tournament caster but his true love is fishing on the saltwater flats and on the coastal steelhead and salmon streams of B.C., Washington, and Oregon.

A short time later, a relatively new club member named Mel Kreiger took Rajeff under his wing. Kreiger had only been fly casting himself for one year, but was already deeply immersed in the sport. He told Rajeff that if he could master the dry-fly accuracy event (one portion of a full ACA tournament) he could easily catch those little trout up in the Sierras. That sparked Rajeff's interest and Kreiger began to coach tournament casting to the nine-year-old after school.

When he was ten, Rajeff entered the club's dry-fly accuracy event in which he finished last behind every one of his adult peers. After some encouragement by Kreiger and another two weeks of practice, Rajeff entered the event again and beat everyone including his coach Mel Kreiger with a score of 97 out of a potential of 100.

Word got around that a ten-year-old had won the champagne dry-fly event at the country's foremost casting club and Rajeff soon had a paying summer job at the Fenwick Fly Fishing School. He was also able to study and learn from the best casters of the day, including Phil Maravalle; Myron Gregory, who at that time held the world record in the two-handed fly distance event; and Jim Green of Fenwick Rods, who not only helped Rajeff become a great caster, but eventually a great rod designer as well.

When Rajeff set his sights on competing at the national level, the casters he would compete against proved to be his most important mentors and coaches. In the months leading up to his first appearance at the World Championships, Rajeff was coached by reigning World Champion John Tarantino. Tarantino was shot and killed in a burglary just one month before the World Championships and never saw his protégé win the title.

Today, Rajeff calls the Golden Gate Casting Club "the finest casting facility in the world" and credits his developmental years there as the foundation of his success. When he was ten years old he had a key to the clubhouse and his own locker for rod storage. He could ride his bike down to the club, take his rods out of the locker, and use one of the club's three casting pools where there were already targets in the water waiting for him. His younger brother Tim learned to fly cast at the Golden Gate Casting Club as well, and also became a great caster. Although Tim never pursued tournament casting to the degree Steve did, he partnered with Steve for the 2003 OLN Fly Fishing Masters Competition, which included both fishing and casting. The pair won the first-place cash prize of $30,000 and Tim bested his brother in the accuracy casting component with a nearly perfect score. After high school, Rajeff became a fly-fishing guide at Kulik Lodge near Katmai National Park in Alaska. By 1980, Rajeff was continuing his tournament domination at the national and international levels when he went to work for Winslow Rods (later named Sage Rods). For six years he worked as a sales representative in the Pacific Northwest.

Rajeff has been G. Loomis's rod designer since 1986. Above, Rajeff, Loomis sales rep Chris Seipio (left), and Loomis pro staffer Steve Choate (center) get ready to test a new line of Spey rods on a steelhead river near Terrace, B.C.

In 1986 he went to work for G. Loomis. He was originally hired to do promotion and demonstration work but within six months he took over the design of G. Loomis rods and blanks. The IMX series was his first project and sent shockwaves through the rod design world that are still felt today. Rajeff followed IMX with his GLX tapers and more recently, the Cross Current and Stream Dance lines of saltwater and freshwater rods. To G. Loomis fans, Rajeff's greatest asset is not his casting, but his mastery of rod design. Although it was small trout in the Sierras that got him hooked on casting, Rajeff now finds some of his biggest fly-fishing thrills on the bonefish and permit flats of Florida and the Caribbean. Florida Keys guide Capt. Bruce Chard says it's every guide's dream to have a caster like Rajeff on the casting platform of his flats skiff. He says the first three days they went fishing for permit, Rajeff landed a permit every day. "Three permit in three days is unheard of where I guide," said Chard. "Every single time a permit came within 90 feet of the boat, the fly was placed perfectly on his nose." Chard says that in one instance, three permit cruised in at about ten o'clock off the bow, Rajeff made a perfect cast, but the permit snubbed the fly and quickly circled around the skiff at breakneck speed. Chard had given up on the fish when Rajeff picked up his line from the ten o'clock position, changed direction 180 degrees and with no false cast laid out 80 feet of line behind his guide's poling platform and practically hit the lead permit in the head. Even though the fish was moving away, it couldn't resist a crab pattern dropping toward the bottom and ate the fly.

"Half the time he sees the fish before I do," says Chard, "and doesn't have the height advantage of a poling platform. Not only do I think he is the best caster in the world, he is the smartest fisherman I've ever had in my boat or been around."

Whether it is on a tournament pool, the bonefish flats, or during the salmonfly hatch on his beloved Deschutes River, Rajeff tries to make the best possible cast. That's something we can all learn from and emulate. Eventually, age will catch up with him and Rajeff may be beaten in tournament casting or just quit altogether. While that might be a huge loss to the tournament community, it will be a small loss to the rest of us who will enjoy casting his rods, and studying his methods, for many years to come.