Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 21 June 2025
So last weekend I took a little trip to Piteå. To meet-up with the fly casters in Piteå for a competition. This time I was the only outsider. Not sure about all the reasons but I guess one big thing was that there are no big competitions coming up this year, so no qualifying for the Swedish team going on.
We started at Saturday with the qualifier and final for Trout Accuracy. Conditions were quite good for accuracy. I didn’t follow the scores that were posted but I heard some good scores being made. I spent my time getting my gear ready and doing a little warm up. My score came out to 52, decent and I was quite happy since most of my competition results in accuracy has been a disaster. And I felt pretty confident to get a spot in the final with that score. But as I have told you before, the level in this competition is high! 52 points meant I was 7th out of eight and outside of the final. Have a look at the scores that would be needed to reach the accuracy final in the world championships. Well the scores cannot be compared exactly like this but it still says something.
But then someone didn’t pass tackle control. The line didn’t have the required laser etching. How a MED loses its etching happens I don’t know, but I have seen it happen on one of my lines. And the sad thing is that it wasn’t the person casting the line that had brought it to the competition. Two competitors got their equipment mixed up. So suddenly I was first out in the final. Trying to see something positive in the incident we can conclude that the integrity is high.
In the final the wind had picked up a bit. I ended up doing really well in the final, I got the score of 65. With a really bad final round, collapsing the delivery on a target that I had 5 points on all other rounds. Still very happy with that score but the bad cast nagging and how I got into the final bringing down the joy a bit.
Distance on the other hand was a disaster from the start. I have been trying a lot of different things recently so I was lost. Things weren’t flying as they should but I ended up sneaking into the finals of Trout Distance and Seatrout Distance. In the Trout final I was still lost, trying to figure out and fix what was wrong in two rounds didn’t work out. Still the Seatrout final left, regroup and push forward hoping to post a decent result here. In the second heat of the Seatrout final I managed to get the casting going somewhat and got away some decent casts which earned me the second place in the Seatrout category.
I think this is the competition I have learnt the most from, the first four the most of my attention was spent on just getting to know how competitions work. No I had some capacity over to reflect and take in things.
Cheers, Rickard
PoD: My score sheet