Jeffrey Pill and his crew from Miracle Productions have been responsible for a handful of solid and exceptionally professional fly fishing videos over the past decade. Last spring they spent three days at San Francisco's Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club, filming the goings-on at the first annual Jimmy Green International Spey-O-Rama. This was a terrific event that didn't get the publicity it deserved, with the result that a score of the world's best casters from England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Japan and the U.S., showed their stuff to an audience that should have been in the thousands rather than the mere hundreds.

The film crew's focus wasn't on the audience, however, but on the rare opportunity to film astonishing casters like Knut and Trond Syrstad, Andy Murray, Nobuo Nodera, Goran Andersson, Way Yin, Simon Gawesworth and Steve Choate, as they demonstrated and discussed spey casting techniques and applications. The fruits of the scores of hours of tape that Miracle Productions shot in San Francisco, augmented by footage taken elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, have just been released in the form of a 3 1/2 hour DVD that sets a new standard for spey casting instructional films.

Spey casting, in case you've been behind the door for the past couple of years, is the term commonly applied to how a growing number of anglers are fly casting, mostly on steelhead and salmon rivers with long two handed fly rods but also with single handed rods, and for trout as well as for their anadramous cousins. As you might expect, a number of different styles of casting have developed out of different fisheries, each with it's own peculiar requirements for ideal rod action and line choice. The salmon rivers of the British Isles have given us long, slower action two-handed rods that facilitate repeated change of direction casts without retrieving any line between drifts. Swift, steep-banked Scandinavian salmon streams have produced a style that favors faster, somewhat shorter rods and a short, bottom-hand-dominant stroke for casting specialty shooting heads. And the snow-melt steelhead rivers of BC and the Washington, where steelhead lie deep in seams and pockets of softer current and prefer a heavy dead-drifted fly, were the birthplace of a third, uniquely American style, favoring strong tipped rods and lines with interchangeable tips in order to cast heavy, quick sinking flies from where they end up at the bottom of a swing to new positions well upstream and across.

The common denominator among these styles is in the way they achieve, without an overhead back cast, both distance and a change of direction between where the fly was when the cast was begun and where it finally lands. Call it spey casting, underhand casting, Skagit casting or anything else, and you're talking about a family of casts that has as much in common as it has differences. And it doesn't apply just to salmon and steelhead fishing, or to two-handed rods. An important subtext that runs through this DVD is that anglers who use single handed rods will be able to significantly increase their efficiency and productivity by learning and applying spey casting techniques to all river fly fishing. Next time you find yourself backed up against the trees with a fish rising 35 feet in front of you, or dealing with a downstream wind that plays bad jokes on your best back cast, or wishing you could keep your fly in the water more without a lot of false casting, you'll be very happy that you learned how to do a single or double spey, a snake roll, a circle-spey or a snap-T. Check out Chris King's demonstration on this DVD and see if he doesn't make a persuasive case for spey casts and the single-handed trout rod.

The DVD is narrated by Lani Waller, whose easy manner and laid back style keep things informal but focused. Simon Gawesworth (whose new book, Spey Casting, Stackpole 2005, is also worth a look if you're interested in learning spey techniques) provides useful introductory comments that help frame the content of the demonstrations.

Prior to each caster's demo, there's a brief interview in which Waller asks them the same questions about how they started spey casting and how anglers should go about learning spey techniques for both single and double handed rods. Sit through the entire three and a half hours in one sitting, which I suspect none but the most devout spey dweeb will do, and the format might get a bit repetitive and predictable. But treat The Art of Spey Casting as an anthology of demos instead of a narrative and you've got something else and I suspect that's no accident. The DVD format (no VHS tape is available) makes it possible to view or abandon a specific section by simply returning to a menu and using the remote to select what you want to see: Goran Andersson's Scandinavian "underhand" technique, for example, or Andy Murray's traditional long line spey casting, or Steve Choate's Skagit techniques. It's a nice way to link content to technology.

In addition to demonstrations and interviews, there are bonus sections on the Spey-O-Rama casting contest, the history of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club, and some informative and frequently very funny scenes about the making of the DVD. There's also a section of interviews with representatives from the DVD's sponsors - Sage rods, Bauer Reels, Water Master Rafts and American Angler magazine. Commercials, in other words, just like on TV, though more informal and interesting, that you can view or ignore as you choose.

I'm generally not a big fan of fly fishing videos, but The Art of Spey Casting is one of those rare instances where great visuals, competent narration, and superior production values make a potentially complicated subject clear, accessible and fun to watch.