Tracy&James | Wednesday, 18 September 2024
I had another very tough competition at the recent BFCC event in Jersey. I don't feel that I've cast particularly well in any of the casting competitions I've entered this year. I don't know if this is down to the weather I've been casting in or if it's just simply the case that I'm not casting that well. My practice seems to be going ok, and I'm still seeing plenty of 40m casts with a #5 line on the right day, albeit with my usual failing of not necessarily hitting such distances within the first few casts. At the BFCC event I typically make 7 or 8 casts in my allotted 3 minutes and I rarely get any warm up time due to helping to run things on the day, so hitting my best form after 10 minutes or so isn't much use as far as results go.
I'm not sure this was the case in Jersey mind you, as everyone seemed to struggle to get good casts away. It was Mike Heritage who won the #5 event with a relatively modest cast of 114ft (34.7m). To rub things in I was casting the #7 outfit in the lane next to Mike at exactly the same time; just before the timer started he mentioned it would be funny if he beat me being as he was using the lighter outfit, and sure enough he did. That said, my cast was enough to win the #7 event, so I think we had the best of the breeze before it swung into all sorts of weird directions including headwinds (it was one of those days when the flags, placed at different distances down the tape, were indicating breezes at 180 degrees within the space of 20 metres).
A couple of days after the competition, and after the torrential rain had moved through, a few of the competitors suggested meeting up for a casting session to erase the memory of the actual casting competition. The forecast, this time, was for a steady high wind perfect for producing some very long casts with the right outfit. Given the 20 mph forecast I decided that the 'right' outfit was the ST27. The others decided to go in for some S&M and cast 5 weights. I should point out that they did a pretty good job of actually making a reasonable back cast and, as such, recorded quite a lot of casts over 40m. With the ST27 my backcast wasn't so much of a problem and I was expecting to be peppering casts over the BFCC record all evening – I was very wrong though. It turned out to be a very frustrating session with a whole load of collapsed casts, the shooting head crumpling into flying spaghetti and falling short of where I was expecting. So far from producing a series of casts above the benchmark I struggled to be consistently over 50m. This was despite the wind strength being pretty much perfect.
Unfortunately that seems to be a feature of many of the grounds that the BFCC casts at – even if the wind forecast is good, often there are elements from different directions that results in loops being buckled out of shape and effectively failing early rather than reaching their ultimate potential. The evening session in Jersey added evidence to this, I think I cast over the BFCC record maybe 5 times in probably an hour and a half's casting. This included one cast that was over 15ft further than the rest, just a step away from the magic 200ft mark that is eluding me. This cast felt exactly the same as all the others. It also looked exactly the same as it left my rod tip. It just held its shape longer than all the others, didn't turn into spaghetti and ended up laying out perfectly. Exactly as I would expect in the kind of wind we were casting in. But then again, perhaps it was for that cast only that the wind actually straightened for the whole flight of the line. So even in seemingly perfect conditions there is still a large degree of luck required to produce a super long cast, especially at the places where the BFCC casts.
I hope your wind blows as straight as an arrow this week.
James,