Tracy&James | Thursday, 20 July 2017
The next few weekends are busy with casting events for Tracy and myself, plus other members of the BFCC. This weekend we are attending the Devon County Show near Tiverton. Here we will be running a couple of free to enter competitions, probably a trout distance and accuracy event, plus Mark Surtees will be on hand to provide expert tuition. We’ll also be joined by Matt Tonkin who is currently leading the race to become the BFCC British champion for this year. I’m presently in second place, not mathematically out of the running but I think I would have to win almost all the events at the last meeting of 2017 in order to overtake Matt. This year the club changed how the champion will be decided – an individual’s best two results in each discipline count, for example if someone comes 3rd, 1st, 4th and 2nd in the #5 trout distance event over four meetings then they will score 3 points (1 + 2, with the 3 and 4 being discarded), obviously the lowest points scorer wins.
There are seven events (#5, #7, ST27, S55g, T38, T120 and Accuracy) cast at each meeting, each counting towards the championship, therefore the overall champion is going to have to be good at all of them. This new system seems to be working in that Matt has been consistently outstanding and well deserves his place on the top of the leader board. He needs to watch out for some rogue Welshman trying to nobble his casting arm before the Brentwood meeting though! After the Devon show we’re hoping to blag a day’s fishing on the River Exe. Last year I encountered one of the dumbest fish I’ve ever come across on this stretch – I hooked it five times but failed to land it, but perhaps that indicates it was smarter than me?
The weekend following Devon we move on to the Game fair at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. There’s an awful lot of work that goes into running a seemingly simple casting competition for the general public; from site visits to arrange the layout of the casting pontoons and measuring ropes, mustering volunteers to run the event, organising rotas so everyone gets some time off to see the show itself, making sure we have everything on hand to run a 3 day event and organising the prizes for more than 18 categories etc. Hopefully we’re largely sorted now and we’re looking forward to what should be a great weekend. No doubt the casting (and perhaps the drinking) will go on long after the public have dispersed for the evening, plus there’s a chance of a spot of carp fishing in the river Lea.
Then, at the start of August, we’ll be travelling up to Lee’s UK fly casting sport centre in Millom, Cumbria. This will be a much easier weekend – no organising for us (plenty for Lee) - just turn up, cast as far as we can and then retire to the bar (to be repeated the next day). We’re both really looking forward to this as it’s such a great venue to cast at.
Perhaps we’ll see you at one of these events. If not have a great time whether you’re fishing or casting.