Tracy&James | Wednesday, 30 July 2025
Tracy and I are currently at home in Wales trying to recover after a great weekend at the Game Fair in Ragley. We never sleep particularly well in a tent so ended up pretty exhausted after 4 nights of camping. Some of this is self inflicted; staying up chatting, casting and drinking to the early hours, whilst other interruptions; geese honking, generator noises, people and cars moving about and the fact it was getting light at 4:30 am are unavoidable. Hopefully after a few lie ins we'll catch up with the sleep we've missed before we head to Derbyshire for a fishing and casting weekend.
We were at the Game Fair assisting the BFCC team of volunteers run the fly casting competitions. This involved running daily trout distance (#7 wt), salmon overhead distance and accuracy events for the public to try their hands at. On our arrival to set-up the day before the fair, the wind was blowing straight in to the casting platform, however the forecast was for it to swing to a westerly, blowing down the lake, and stay that way for the course of the weekend. The forecast was thankfully correct for a large part of the time, although early in the morning it was a bit of a lottery before the breeze steadied. We were also fortunate to only have a couple of short rain showers over the course of the weekend.
Despite being stuck down at the far end of the lake, a short walk from the fishing village, the casting comps were pretty busy, with many familiar faces from previous game fairs trying to improve as well as some first timers. As always there was a mix of skills on display, however irrespective of the results people really enjoyed it. I think the most popular competition was the accuracy, which is slightly unusual because in previous years it's been the least popular. The rules for the daily accuracy are different from the championship, requiring the caster to hit anywhere within the largest hoop, however no one managed to score a perfect score although one caster missed it by the smallest margin possible. The scores from all the competitions can be found on the BFCC Facebook page if you're interested.
Of course the BFCC were also there to run the Game Fair fly casting championship, a combined #5 trout distance, S55 salmon distance and accuracy to world championship rules. The more serious casters entered this, most of whom were already BFCC members so used to competing in the three disciplines. Casters are allowed to improve (or try to) over the course of the weekend, so they can try and pick the time that the weather suits them best, rather than being allocated. Everyone had to compete with exactly the same gear though.
Once the casting had finished on the Sunday, Nick Moore was leading the trout distance with a respectable 36 metres, I was one metre behind him on 35m. I was pretty pleased with this because although I chose to cast right handed, I still cannot grip a slim rod handle and lack any sort of power in turning the rod over. On the salmon distance event Steve Parkes continued his run of good form (he broke the BFCC record recently) by taking a win with a 60 metre cast. This is the perfect distance for the game fair as our measuring ropes only have buoys out to 60m, so we don't know what we'd have done if he would have cast further. I was one metre behind Steve on 59m, I don't do a lot with my right hand in the salmon event (other than block the back cast) so my injury didn't affect me much. In the accuracy event I was very pleased to see Tracy take the win with 52 points. Tracy has to compete in the 'open' category due to a lack of females competitors in the championship (but not in the dailies where there were quite a lot of female entries). As such, she was delighted to beat all the men. I came second in accuracy 1 point behind Tracy, although I did score higher in practice. Accuracy is probably the event that hurts me most, despite changing my grip to finger on top I'm still finding my hand starts to cramp about half way through the event. I should therefore perhaps be grateful that I got the score I did.
The overall championship is then calculated on a cumulative percentage system. Despite not winning a single event, it turned out that my margins of defeat (1 metre, 1 metre and 1 point) meant that I had a clear winning score of 293.6% out of a possible maximum of 300. Tracy performed fantastically, recording an overall score of 269.2% to take second place and Nick Moore was close behind her in third place on 267%. Fourth was Stewart Ross, who was delighted to have set an accuracy PB in the competition after having picked up some tips from the others.
The evenings at camp BFCC were spent chatting, carp fishing (unsuccessfully), drinking and casting the lumi line once it got dark. I've never seen a lumi line look as bright as it did against the dark background of the tree-lined far bank of the lake. There's some great video of it posted on social media if you want to look for it.
On Saturday the BFCC is hosting the Derbyshire meeting at the Ashford in the Water cricket club. They'll be the usual mix of top class instruction and competitions, so if you can make it come along – we even supply tea and coffee.
Hope you're having a great week,
James.