Tracy&James | Thursday, 26 July 2018
This weekend James and I will be going to the Game Fair at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire. We are part of the BFCC team that is organising the fly casting competitions, a team that includes quite a few entrants to the World Championships next month in Cumbria. Besides running the comps, we all hope to do some practice in preparation for the competition in August, so have this year made the trout distance championship identical to the Worlds #5 event. Whereas we have kept the Daily trout distance event a #7 so that casters not into distance casting can use a ‘regular’ outfit to compete with.
In addition to trout distance, we have salmon overhead outfit with 55g line and Spey in both the Championship and Daily events. Last year we had more people enter the salmon overhead than the Spey, though the single handed comps were generally much more popular again. The sea trout distance is only being run as a Championship comp, using the Club outfit. Everyone casting the same outfits can be more of a fairer approach to participating in a casting comp, however it’s probable that the gear will suit certain people more than others.
It takes a lot of organising to run such an event and we’ve spent quite a bit of time preparing, including going to the site to do a recce earlier in the year. Hopefully the weekend comps will run smoothly and we can look forward to relaxing in the evening with a nice glass of wine whilst we watch JT cook on the BBQ. These things are generally a great excuse for an awesome social with lots of fishy mates and hopefully the carp will be keen to take a fly or two (we have lots of dog biscuits ready, though hopefully we won’t need to resort to eating them if the BBQing doesn’t go well – I’ll make sure James goes nowhere near it!).
This year we are reinstating the accuracy competition to the World’s rules so it’s going to be interesting to see how the general public manage to alter the line distance in the air. At BFCC Meetings, we’ve seen some curious approaches to this – teeth were involved in one case. Hopefully this will be a popular activity and we’ll have people returning during the weekend to improve their score, as the best score over the whole weekend will win the championship trophy.
We will be holding the Finals of the distance championship events on Sunday afternoon; this is likely to be a spectacular display with several of the UK entrants to the Worlds competing against each other. So if you are going to the Game Fair, pop down to the lake and have a go at the competitions, or come and watch the Finals. We even have a fishing celebrity to present the prizes – you’ll have to come along to find out who!
All the best
Tracy