Tracy&James | Wednesday, 1 July 2026
Tracy and I are up in Scotland right now, Tracy is working and I'm just hanging about, thinking about doing some casting practice but not getting round to it. Actually I can still feel a hint of tennis elbow so I'm reluctant to go out and cause further injury with a 15ft Spey rod. I don't know why it is, but I always think I should practice Spey casting whilst in Scotland, rather than anything single handed. Where we are staying is on the banks of a sea loch, so there are numerous calm, shallow bays where I could wade out and cast. A week or so back I was at Bala lake in North Wales practising with Steve – he pointed out a couple of issues that I need to work on with regards to my single Spey cast, so I know what I'm going to work on when I do get out.
Tracy has booked her work trip to coincide with going to the Scottish Game Fair, starting this Friday. By already being up here it means we have just a couple of hours drive to get to the fair, rather than a 6 hour one from Wales. As such, we intend to arrive in plenty of time to have a relaxed set-up, something to eat and perhaps some casting or fishing on the river Tay which forms the boundary of the show ground. Unfortunately the organisation of the fishing side of things at the show has been a bit haphazard, due mostly to the retirement of the fishing organisers after the show last year. The fair organisers clearly don't know what these guys did in terms of making that part of the show a success and I think they just imagined things happened by magic. As such, we've recently found out that we don't have any helpers for the casting competitions – just the few BFCC members who normally go. We're anticipating being run off our feet for the whole weekend as the Scottish comps are usually very busy, so if you're anywhere near Scone Palace next weekend and can help out, then we'd be very, very grateful.
I'm not sure I'm going to compete at this Game Fair due to my elbow. I did enter all of the events at the BFCC meeting a couple of weeks back but I didn't do well in a few of the disciplines, perhaps because subconsciously I was protecting my elbow – I'm not sure. It's probably best that I rest up for a bit in order to make sure I can compete at the English Game Fair towards the end of July.
As usual the Scottish Game Fair competitions will have daily events in trout accuracy, trout distance and salmon distance, hopefully with prizes for juniors, males and females. I say 'hopefully' because the organisers will need to find the prizes and I think that's also one of the things they believed happened by 'magic'. There will also be the championship competition where casters will have to enter all three disciplines and the overall winner will be determined on a percentage system. We took the trophy to be engraved with the previous year's winner last week (which actually was a pain as we had to drive miles to an engraver who could cope with 'cups'), whilst doing so we noticed some very well known names on it. It will be interesting to see how things pan out at the weekend to determine the next name on the list.
Hope you're having a great week,
James