Tracy&James | Sunday, 7 February 2021
At the start of every BFCC casting day Tracy gives a talk about safety; the usual stuff about slips, trips and falls plus some more specific stuff about casting events. She mentions the importance of eye protection as, even though no hooks are used, a piece of fluff moving at tournament casting speed is still going to potentially cause considerable damage if whipped into the face. Attendees are warned about giving casters a wide berth both front and back, as it’s easy to forget about how much space a top caster is going to fill with a fly-line (e.g. 80ft behind and 120ft in front). She goes on to mention the importance of checking the rod joints every so often, as under the repeated, heavy loading involved in distance casting, they have a tendency to work themselves loose. If this goes unnoticed then the result can be a broken rod and various sections being flung down the casting court at a rate of knots. I’ve heard her safety talk so many times now that I think I could recite it word for word, it hasn’t stopped me breaking two rods in exactly the manner described in the last six months though, with a #10 Sage falling foul of my ineptitude last weekend. To add to Tracy’s annoyance that her warnings clearly have had no impact on me, both the rods I broke were hers!
The latest breakage has temporarily halted my progress in learning the ‘step’ for distance casting and particularly the PULD competition. For me, putting a step into my casting stroke, i.e. moving from an open stance back-cast to a closed-stance delivery, can be considered either easy or difficult, depending on how I view things. It’s easy to make the decision to put the step in and to get my legs to move, however it’s difficult to realise any distance gains from doing so. Actually it’s really easy for me to actually lose a big chunk of distance due to introducing a quite horrendous tracking error, however I’m slowly ironing this out. Once in a while I’m now seeing some good casts and can sort of glimpse the potential that this technique has. Certainly if you look at the top end of the PULD competition leader board there’s a lot of steppers (or newly converted steppers) who have cast over 40m.
Whilst our #5 distance rod is away for repair, Tracy and I have been practising with the ST27 and S55 outfits. We’re really hoping that they’ll be some BFCC events this year, but currently it’s too early to arrange anything. In the meantime we’re thinking about starting another online casting competition/challenge. We’ve had some comments that out-and-out distance may put off quite a number of casters, so the next competition is going to be centred around a presentation cast. We’ll see if this gets some non-distance casters involved or whether it’s the same people who take part. The details will be posted on Facebook sometime soon, there will also be prizes but we’re still working out what they might be.
Have a great week,
James.