Nick Moore | Saturday, 8 April 2023
What a fantastic long weekend! It was great catching up with fellow casters and having 3 intense days of casting. Thursday was my travel day, and I made it up to Cumbria after being stuck on the M6 for a good hour and a half, no matter. As soon as I got there, I had to practice, so out came the Sage Igniter 691-4 and the SA MED5. After the practice I went to see Tracy and James (they were down the opposite end of the lake practicing Spey casting).
Now, using a two handed rod is not my strong point, and it really does feel like I’m just flailing around. It’s rather strange, because I can do Speys with a single handed rod coupled with the MED5. The first day included the Spey competitions, followed by S55 and ST27 the second day, and finally trout distance and accuracy.
I won the trout distance event, but it was very close! I threw 38m in the qualifying round, and then 35.5m in the final, only beating a fellow caster by 1m in the final, and coming second in the qualifying (loosing by half a metre!) So the burning question, what has to be used for these events? Well, it was world championship rules, so a scientific anglers mastery expert distance competition #5 line, which is 120’ long, any 9’ rod, and a 3m leader. Casting time is 4 minutes. When I was casting I tried something different, I didn’t really look down the measuring rope, I wanted to concentrate on making the nicest loops possible and ‘floating’ the forward cast out there without much effort. Relying on tracking and line speed to get it to fly rather than brute force, but of course I did eventually hit some casts at the wrong time, and it showed as a collapsed heap at the front! The fix was quite easy, slow down and apply the force smoothly, which was the ticket for relaxing.
Here is the Trout distance final, the flag was flying but it was fairly still where we were casting, apparently its quite unusual not to have any wind around there.
Tight lines!