Update:
My wife outfished me 3-1 on small cutthroat at Cascade Lake where we were both pitching spinners in a high wind. I tried casting a Woolly Bugger briefly, but just couldn't handle the wind. My total would have been higher, but I lost a couple before I could officially release them.
We got skunked on the Lamar River, she with the bubble-fly combo and me with the flyrod (see following questions).
I got a small brown and lost a couple of others on the Gibbon, using an Elk Hair Caddis (yay!)
We both got skunked on the Madison.
Questions:
Given the following situation:
1) Under "typical" conditions (yeah, I know) what angle should A (the angle between shore and my target) and B (where A + B is when I take the fly out of the water) be? Assume the novice caster is fishing from shore and there are no specific fish I'm trying to cast to.
2) Whatever B is, what is supposed to happen next? I snapped off a couple of flies in the water in the Lamar and later realized I had too much line out, it would get caught in the current, and then as I tried to pull it all out, it would eventually overstress the knot and break off the fly.
To remedy this, I cast slightly upstream and started stripping in line to account for the line/fly drifting in front of me. When the current started to drag the fly, I would either do a back cast and a couple of false casts to get the line back to the angle I wanted...should I take the line out of the water as it passes directly in front of me (ie, A + B = 90 degrees?)
3) Assuming a 7.5 foot pack rod, how much line (again, as a novice) should I realistically expect to be able to cast? (I should have asked this earlier.)
Thanks, everyone for the tips - I could very easily see getting hooked (heh) on this, as the time on the Gibbon where I actually caught fish (and had some rise to take the fly that I either missed or didn't land) were tremendous fun!