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One afternoon in the summer of 1974, in one of the patchwork of stone-walled fields and Iron Age castells and anti-Viking-raider forts on a North Pembrokeshire clifftop I was shown how F.W.K. probably achieved his record cast. I had been introduced to the Wallis Cast in early 1972, by Gordon Edwards, a very well-preserved, highly sophisticated gentleman of 60 at the time, who had been taught the cast by Wallis himself on the banks of the Royalty in the late 1920s or early 1930s. My casting skills moved on apace, and by 1974 as I was pretty well on a par with Gordon. But Gordon, as we fished together, often daily sometimes for weeks on end, kept saying to me: "We're nothing special, Paul. You'll see that if you ever meet Ken..." - Ken Guy of Nottingham, a man a few years Gordon's senior who also learned the cast from F.W.K., both on the Royalty (with Gordon) and on his and Wallis's home river, the Trent.

And in summer 1974, I finally did meet Ken, when he visited Gordon at his cliff-top eyrie in West Wales to talk old times.

The tournament cast?

Performed without a hook, of course - just a lead. Thrown onto the grass of the field behind him, then, with with a swift upward lift that really compressed the rod, was put into the air over his shoulder, then, at the point of maximum compression, with the lead somewhere directly above his head, he stripped the reel line with a massive swipe of his non-rod-hand and sent the lead on its way, swivelling his body round to face the field where the lead was to land nearly sixty yards away.

He taught me a "non-grounded" version of that Overhead Wallis Cast (for actual fishing) the same afternoon. And the Pendulum Roll Wallis Cast, too.

As Gordon had long told me, Ken was very very good.