Tracy&James | Thursday, 11 July 2019
Tracy is currently organising things for the Game Fair, this year to be held at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. Again the BFCC will be running the fly casting competitions and have assembled a great team of volunteers to help over the course of the weekend.
The competitions that we’ll be running are trout distance (probably with a #7 outfit as we can’t guarantee we won’t be hit by a head wind at some point), sea trout distance (ST27), salmon overhead (S55g), and a 16ft platform Spey Comp with a 30 degree angle change. All these events will be run as championships with qualifying on Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning with the finals on Sunday afternoon. There will also be an Accuracy event (WC rules) which will run all weekend with the winner being the highest score recorded over the three days. The trout distance and salmon overhead events will also be available for a daily competition for those who aren’t attending all weekend. So that’s the plan anyway – last year this was all literally blown out of the water by gale force winds and torrential rain so bad that it forced a complete abandonment. Hopefully we’ll be luckier this year.
Regardless of the weather, we always seem to have a great time at the Game Fair – there’s so many friends to catch up with, plenty of good food, loads of casting and the odd drink or two in the evening. So if you’re going please come and say hello to us down by the river.
This weekend we’re going back to Wales. We’re already pretty tied up with family commitments but we hope to get at least a few hours on the Dee. I had a great day’s dry fly fishing last time I was there, landing a number of the beautiful brown trout and several grayling. It was one of those days where I tied on a scruffy looking klink first thing and didn’t feel the need to change it all day – I also managed to avoid leaving it in a tree. The fish weren’t exactly going mad on the surface, however there were sufficient rises to keep up the belief that the dry fly was the correct approach. In hindsight I suspect a klink and dink approach would have been even more successful, but then some days are not about maximising the number of fish caught but enjoying being riverside, in the lovely country and in good company.