Tracy&James | Wednesday, 15 July 2026
The Scottish Game Fair was a highlight for me as it was only the second time I had won an open competition against mainly male entrants. The first time was at the last Welsh Game Fair a couple of years ago, however there was no trophy and we went straight into a final with the winners of all the Game Fairs (the Scottish, the English and the Welsh) so there wasn't much time to post anything about winning. In that final I came third behind James and Steve. This year I won the Scottish cup so my name will be engraved on it alongside a long list of good casters. Not bad for a busy weekend where I only had one entry into each of the 3 events that make up the championship.
There won't be a final at Ragley this year as we have found that as we only have two Game Fairs and generally the Scottish winners don't attend the Ragley event, there isn't enough entrants for a final. Instead we allow entries to the Ragley event by the Scottish winners, if they come, throughout the weekend, so that they have multiple opportunities at the Championship. This time it's just myself and Chris who came third – though both of us will be competing at Ragley anyway - and Ben who won the Junior championship.
Instead we will be running an invitational casting session at 3:30pm each day. This will involve a small number of the top casters at the Game Fair competing with the same outfit with tannoy announcements (probably done by myself) explaining who they are and what their distances are. We will then announce the winner (although there will be no actual prize - perhaps we can come up with a 'prize' such as the winner gets served drinks during that evening, or maybe a pair of socks...??). The outfits each day will be either trout distance, ST27 or S55g – dependant on the weather.
At Scone, we had only one volunteer on the Sunday whereas normally we would have had around 4 volunteers per day, so this made it quite a challenge for us. At Ragley we intend to rectify this and have a good number of supporters, though a couple of our usual helpers are now instructors so will be providing tuition with FFI during the weekend instead. Hence I have enlisted a few more volunteers just to make sure we can run all the events concurrently so the public don't have to wait too long to compete.
Before Ragley however we have one of our BFCC meetings at our usual venue in Ashford-in-the-Water near Bakewell. It's a beautiful location and we normally combine the visit with a fishing trip, however with the current heatwave we've decided to skip this. It's potentially going to be a busy day with lots of people coming for instruction. Hopefully the current weather prediction will remain as it is forecast to be slightly cooler on Sunday.
James has started his lefty-S55g casting, he said he was going to practice this after the Scone weekend where the wind blew consistently into the rod side of the right handers. He's had three sessions so far; the first one he said he was happy with the backcast but the delivery needed work. After the second session, yesterday, he reported that he'd made some big improvements to his forward cast but his distance was held back by tough weather conditions. Today (as I write) the wind had turned to a more favourable direction on our usual field and things came together with a best cast of 212ft (64.5m). So it took him three sessions to achieve the 200ft left handed cast that he wanted, he's now targeting 65m and then 70m. I have also been practising my S55g technique, though I'm sticking to casting right-handed. It has been progressing well with some nice distances, though whenever I take the rod to cast the wind seems to die down.
Weather permitting we will do a little bit more practice before Sunday.
Cheers,
Tracy