Tracy&James | Sunday, 5 September 2021
Tracy and I have a busy week coming up, unfortunately busy with work commitments rather than fishing. We are however finishing the week by attending the Hampshire Country Sports show near Petersfield where we’ll be running a hopefully fun, free to enter fly casting competition on behalf of the BFCC.
We’ve tried to think of something new for this year rather than just a straight accuracy competition. Most of the entrants tend to be casting instructors so we’ve come up with something that will challenge them, based on the virtual competitions we ran over last winter. We’ve come up with the fly-casting triathlon. Incidentally, this year we’ve noticed a distinct drop in the numbers of casters who want to take part in the competitions at BFCC events – the B100 category, which used to be very popular with the non-tournament casters,hasn’t had enough competitors to declare a winner at any of the days run so far. I’m not sure why this is but hopefully things will pick up soon – competing really is a sure fire way to make progress, and a number of the former B100 casters are now pushing the BFCC casting records.
Anyway, back to the casting triathlon. This is going to consist of an accuracy element, at the world championship target but cut down in the number of loops around the course and maybe 3 targets rather than 4, we’ll look to make a typical score of around 30 or so. To this we’ll add a PULD cast with the same 5 outfit used with the accuracy. As the final element we’ve decided to add a wiggle cast – probably 3 of them in order to make each part (i.e. accuracy, PULD and wiggle) of equal value.
Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. If it’s not working we’ll probably go back to just a simple accuracy only competition. Whatever we do Tracy and I will not be competing but we are more than happy to discuss all things competition related on the day.
All the best, James.
P.S. the fishing has been steady on the Dee this week, tough at times and then sporadic patches of feeding fish – mostly small ones (for me anyway) with the odd better fish mixed in.