Good advice above. I'd add that's it's sometimes viable, even advantageous to cast over your off shoulder. I don't fish dries (dead drift) often on small canopied water, it's more of a challenge than I'm usually up for. Streamers and wets though, now we are talking! The current, which is often troublesome with a dry, is now your ally.. swimming your fly right into the hot zones. With your cast set-up nice, it's perfect to swim/swing fly with spot on angles to fish holding structure like submerged wood and bend jams which will also (mostly) be at inherent downstream angles. Bank hop when able is best but wading with a studied eye can negate much of the downstream drift your feet create.
Back to which arm / shoulder to cast from.. I like my delivery to touch down with an innate downstream even 'bow' in line and leader. It provides instant tension and your fly is swimming nicely on imediate. Which arm / shoulder cast from is huge influence on achieving this.
Rods I like and use are 6'6" - 7' 2wt - 5wt. with nice even progressive action. If you ever wanted a reason to fish glass THIS is it. Run leader shorter than 9' matching the rod or even a bit less has worked well for me. As mentioned prior, roll or some type of spey* cast is going to be best around 85% of the time.
*Spey cast is just a water borne roll (cast) with some change of direction. Not to difficult to get a quick feel for, especially with shorter range use.
Small stream fishing
