Tracy&James | Wednesday, 7 August 2024
The Game Fair casting competitions were a bit of a mixed bag for me personally, with some highs and some really poor lows. Going into the weekend I knew I wasn't at my best distance casting wise, but I had been doing alright when practising accuracy. That said, I was also aware that it's easy to fool yourself into thinking you're scoring great when casting at small targets (I use little plastic cones as targets), but when faced with the comparatively large World Championship specification target it's easy for precision to suffer. I'm not sure why this is, but with a small target my misses tend to be smaller than with a big bulls-eye. With a percentage scoring system in place, I knew that the accuracy event offered the best chance of beating the competition by over 10% which should have given me enough to make up for my trout distance perhaps not being at its best.
As things turned out I did post the best score of the weekend in accuracy, beating the nearest challenger by 40% with a score of 60. This was more than enough to ensure that I won the English leg of the Game Fair championship, as there was no way I was going to lose 20% in both of the distance events (trout and salmon overhead) however badly I was casting. I actually managed to also win the salmon S55 event and then lost only 6% in the trout distance, thus I retained a 40% winning margin once the results from the three events were aggregated.
We then went into the final on the Sunday. Here, the winners and runners -up from the Scottish Game Fair were invited to join those who had just qualified in a shoot-out for the Trophy. The casting order was drawn from a cap, as was the order of the three events – trout distance followed by accuracy and then finishing with salmon overhead.
From the moment we got up in the morning it was clear that the casting conditions were going to be very tough (they were tough all weekend as shown in the longest trout distance cast recorded, just 33.5m). However, things were especially hard on the Sunday (for distance casters that is, for sitting on the bank with an ice cream the weather was great). Often the air would be completely still for minutes on end and then when a slight breeze picked up it was either a head wind, blowing in from the right or, if you were exceptionally lucky, blowing straight down the ropes. These breezy moments were short lived, twenty seconds or so before the river settled into a glassy flat calm.
As I walked out for the first event of the final, trout distance, I knew I was into a damage limitation exercise. I put my banker cast in, into what felt like a slow moving mass of air coming at me, and then waited for the breeze to change. It didn't! I might have had a couple of extra casts to prove a point to myself, but I couldn't improve on my 'banker'. I walked off the platform with a cast of 28.5m or 93 feet, by far the lowest distance I've ever posted in a competition. This saw me in last place of the finalists and 15% down (a big margin in a distance event). Next up was accuracy though which I was fairly confident about given my earlier win. I did in fact win this again (clearly my pre-weekend training had paid off) and I claimed back 12% over the nearest competitor, thus I went into the final event just 3% down on the leader.
Salmon Overhead (S55) distance is one of my favourite events, despite me never actually fishing with a double handed rod ever. I managed to get into the final at the last World Championship and I hold the current overall BFCC record with a cast of 70m (although my PB is 80m). As such, I was relatively confident that I could overhaul a 3% deficit. How wrong I was. Stepping up on the platform I had a strange sense of deja-vu regarding the wind – surely I couldn't get the same as what I had for the trout distance? Well yes I could, for 4 minutes I had a slow moving wall of air drifting into me and all I could manage was 38m, another all time low for me. So once again I finished last amongst the finalists. Steve Parkes, casting immediately after me, was set to come last however with just 10 seconds left on the clock a breeze picked up blowing down the ropes and Steve took full advantage and threw a cast 10 metres past mine.
After all the scores were entered into the spreadsheet it turned out that Nick Moore ultimately prevailed by just 5% over Steve. So well done to Nick – the trophy is currently at the engravers to have his name added. Hopefully I'll be back casting better next year though.
I should also mention that Tracy actually had some female competition this time, so she didn't have to enter the men's event. She did win all three events but she was pushed by Marina Gibson who put in a consistent set of scores to come second.
Right, I'm off out now to do some practice – hopefully I'll cast a #5 outfit more than 93 feet!
James.