Tracy&James | Wednesday, 16 September 2026
Tracy and I have just arrived home after a long weekend in Jersey, where the BFCC held a casting day on Saturday. The weather was as good as could be expected for mid-September – predominantly sunny with a temperature of 20 or 21 degrees C, with just the odd, short rain shower. We arrived on Friday morning and had some time to kill before we got access to our AirBnB, so we did a bit of a tour of the north of the island, always on the look out for anglers. We ended up in the cafe at St. Catherine's breakwater for a much needed coffee having had to get up at 2am in order to get to the airport for our early flight.
Because we were flying in and carrying all the club outfits for the competition event and for instructing, we did not have any room (or weight) left for fishing stuff. We obviously could have put a box of flies in and used a competition outfit to fish with, however our main issue was lack of waders. With neither of us particularly wanting to wet wade given the treacherous rocks around the coast, we figured the days outside of the BFCC day would be spent sight seeing or doing the odd casting training session.
After the coffee we decided to walk down the breakwater to see what the anglers there were up to. It wasn't hard to find the most successful angler and we stopped to watch him for a while. He was throwing out a set of feathers for mackerel with one rod, but he also had two other rods set up with enormous floats (bobbers) under which he was live-baiting the mackerel that he caught every so often (when a shoal would happen past). He'd already caught a bass on one of these set-ups and had three more missed runs whilst we were there watching him. I was somewhat surprised by how big the mackerel bait was in relation to the bass (the one he had in his bag was around 3lb, but he mentioned he'd had an 8 lb'er a few days earlier). It made me think about the flies on which I've caught bass on in the past – Clousers, gummy minnows etc., all tiny in comparison. In future I may take out my #10 outfit fishing so I can chuck the size of flies that I would usually cast at cudas or sharks.
We also saw a clip on FB that someone had filmed the day we arrived showing a big blue fin tuna hitting baitfish maybe just 20 or 30 yards (certainly within fly casting range) off a northern Jersey beach. Now that would be a bit special – a fly caught BFT off the shore. I'm not sure what sort of tackle you'd need to stop such a fish, but I can guess my #10 saltwater outfit would be seriously under gunned, even with it's 400m of backing.
As far as the competition events were concerned, I was disappointed with my performance on the day. I've no real explanation for what happened as I was casting well in the lead up, but I guess I'll just have to write it off as one of those things. Due to last year's mishap with the rods on the return trip (where they went missing for a few weeks), I'd decided to minimise the amount of my personal casting outfits I'd take over in favour of the club outfits. As such, I decided to have some practice with the S55 rod before the competition started as it is very different from my own rod. Typical to my form I cast it 15ft further in that practice than I did a few moments later in the four minutes that counted. There was a similar story in the #5 trout distance, where my warm-up felt really good but then I just didn't get a good cast away and finished 10ft behind the winner. The events I felt were sub-par for me were all in the afternoon, after Tracy had bought a pitcher of lager shandy for lunch – so perhaps I'd slipped over my alcohol peak, although it's embarrassing to admit that from drinking shandy. The last discipline of the day was the accuracy and again I wasn't happy with my score, my lowest of the year, so I was very fortunate that my distances with the heavier gear (cast in the morning) were enough for me to hold-on to a narrow overall win. I went back to our digs and read Rickard's Saturday FP about dealing with poor performance – it seemed very apt.
Incidentally, putting a tracker in with the rod tube took a lot of the anxiety out of our travel this time. We could tell the rods were on the plane before we took off and knew for certain they were back in Liverpool with us when we landed. Last year they were also in Liverpool, but when the Bazuka tube didn't turn up on the carousel, the staff there told us it hadn't been loaded in Jersey. This was a lie, but we couldn't prove it. We were ready with tracker evidence if that would have happened again.
Lastly I should say a big thank you to Mark and Chris for flying over to provide casting instruction and to our Jersey hosts for their hospitality – with a special mention to Kevin and Laura for loaning us their car so we could keep our transport costs down (and for loaning me some tackle to catch a mackerel from the breakwater – I didn't have time to offer it up to the bass, so it went back alive).
I hope your having a great week,
James