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As you know, in the "switch reelers" thread I talked about my friend who learned how to reel and cast with either hand. I didn't mention his motivation, which was pain (apparently neurological) that, if I remember rightly (it was quite a few years ago) fluctuated day to day and might be felt in one arm, or the other arm, or both arms, without much predictability. So his motivation was similar to yours. My friend had a night job, which meant that his days throughout the work week were largely free to go fishing or to practice casting. He really worked at it, and at the end of a year he truly had mastered ambidextrous casting. Thereafter he was able to switch hands at will for casting and reeling, not merely to avoid pain but to increase his ability to handle conflicting winds, obstacles to a backcast, or any other angling problem or challenge. As I recall, during times when he felt no pain he did not necessarily switch back to his primary handedness, but comfortably handled the rod and reel based on stream conditions. So he experienced lasting benefits as the result of his hard work. I hope this is an encouragement as you face a similar challenge.

Jeremy: It's natural that your first attempts seemed promising, because you felt optimistic and you could concentrate on the things that were going right. It's also natural that in subsequent attempts you are paying more attention to the problems, and seeing them as frustrating obstacles because progress isn't coming quickly and steadily. This is when you have to keep scheduling frequent, regular casting sessions, even if you don't feel like any progress is being made. In fact, you probably feel like you're going backwards, rather than moving ahead. I am no neurobiologist, but it wouldn't surprise me if a concentrated attempt to use the non-dominant arm in a repetitive way causes neural pathways in the brain and body to start shifting and reorganizing. If you keep going in spite of the obstacles, eventually these new pathways will get synchronized and your new skills will emerge too. But at this point, the new neural pathways are just beginning to grope their way toward figuring out what you're trying to do with your body, and reorganizing to support your new behavior. They've been messed with, and for a while it may actually make casting sessions a bit harder. I suspect that a key decision will be just to keep up regular practice sessions. They don't need to be very long sessions, but they should be frequent and regular, and you shouldn't give up because you don't see good results. I predict that all of a sudden the good results will come.

It may be like what I went through to learn the hambo, a complicated Scandinavian turning dance. I tried for months to master it, and I was so clumsy and felt so uncoordinated. And this was embarrassing because there were other folk dances that I knew very well. But I persevered. And then one day - seemingly no different from any other day - I tried dancing the hambo and wham! everything clicked and I was dancing. I realized that the months of frustrating effort where I had perceived no progress had actually been full of steady progress, but the actualization of that progress all came together in that single moment.