Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 30 August 2025
Next weekend we have the Swedish nationals in fly casting coming up. And my preparation is a bit all over the place. The date has been sneaking up on me so a lot of the preparations are a bit behind or none existing. Some parts are in place though. Found some good improvements in the distance stroke, but there are things to improve there at the moment.
What I don’t have in place is which line I’m going to use for the trout distance event. It has to be a MED5. But I have ran through many of the good ones in practice and are now kind of retired. I find that at some point they start to tangle a lot more, don’t want that to happen during the few minutes I have during the competition. I have a couple of new ones that took a while to arrive so I haven’t cast those. Just put them on the scale and there they look very similar. They might be but I’ll have to do some casting to see if any one of them feels a little bit better.
After casting them I put some notes on them describing how they felt. Like the current practice line had the note “Short head?”. It got that note because it was hard(er) to reach a decent carry when testing it. Now I have gotten up to quite decent carry number with that line so maybe I have improved a bit?
Seatrout distance is what it is. I’m not a huge fan of casting shooting heads, so I have also signed up for the casting sport single handed events. The fly casting and the casting sport competition are co-arranged. Not a bad idea here to make the event a bit bigger.
I have done one good thing though. I have started to take more serious notes from my training and competitions. Well I have a lot of notes in the Notes app but that doesn’t seem to give as good overview as pen and paper. So I’ll have a quick look there and write down some checklist before the competition. If you don’t have a physical training log, try it! Even if I’m very used to take and keep notes digitally. A keyboard is like an extension of my mind. But I still find that for many things taking notes with pen and paper is much better.
The keyboard as an extension of my mind is an interesting thing. At work I sometimes cannot answer things directly, I have to spend some time “letting my fingers think”. The problems is that when my mind wanders, so does the things on the computer screen as the fingers follows.
I have decided which rod to use for accuracy also. The one I have been practicing the most with. I had the idea that a bit softer rod could be something, but my softer rod is too soft.
The same isn’t true for trout distance though, there I can switch to a stiffer rod and after a cast or two throw further. So I often practice with a “soft” rod. I find it a bit more fun to do play stuff with the HT7 than the HT10.
An other thing that could be better is that I will be on a work related trip the days leading up to the competition. So no practice the last couple of days. And flying home late the night before the competition. This will be interesting.
(Pause in the writing)
So now I have tested all the new MEDs. Which means empty a number of reels to put them on. Weighing them. Measuring them. Casting them.
I did just weigh the full lines, not parts of them. The biggest difference I found was 0.25 grams. All of the lines were long enough. I have gotten one or two that was too short to be competition legal. The lengths were also consistent, just one line that was noticeable longer.
I did some carry cycles with each line as my casting test. All out max carry to find where I lost control of the line. After losing control I stripped back the slip to get back to approximately where I was still in control. Here there was a quite noticeable difference. With one of the lines my shortest carry matched the longest I got with the other lines.
So now I have a good idea which line I’ll use for competition. I just have to compare it with some other lines.
Cheers, Rickard