Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 13 September 2025
Last weekend it was the Swedish nationals in fly casting and casting sport. The event it self was great and I’ve heard that efforts are being made to make it even better and bigger next year. The really good things were that we had a good number of volunteers to help with everything, a speaker system and efforts to make it more clear for the audience what’s going on. These are things we must be better at to attract more people. If you see some sporting event going on but you cannot understand what’s going on it is hard to get interested in it.
How did I personally do? I learned things. I get better and better at managing my mind during a competition but still failed at some parts. Some of these failures could’ve been avoided by better preparations of materiel and others in training and planning.
I was away for a business trip the days leading up to the competition. As I mention in my previous FP it gave a mental break. But traveling is a risk as you get exposed to a lot of stuff. And often quite busy so your sleep is impacted. So of course I got sick during the trip. In the morning of the final day of the trip I woke up and felt a bit sore in my throat. Washing hands, alcogel and lots of vitamin C didn’t save me. This was the day before the competition. The next morning I wasn’t totally out but when you are sick contact lenses are a no go. Which meant that I had no sunglasses. First event was trout accuracy with high glare from the water and of a platform about 4 feet above the water level. I had one idea that worked somewhat but not really good for the sun. I poped the lenses out of a couple of sporty sunglasses which I balanced on the inside of my regular glasses.
I spent soo much time on trying to figure out the visibility thing that I forgot to spend time on how the height of the plattform would affect distance gauging. It was quite a bit, even if I tried casting from a kneeling position. So I did see a lot of my casts land right outside of the rings.
There was another problem too, the wind coming in quite strongly from behind. I had a hard time understanding why it was so hard to get my back casts into the wind. The wind was strong but it felt like casting into a wall. After the round I found the reason. I had lent my rod to another caster who had turned the rings back in so the line didn’t shoot as expected on the back cast.
Still scored enough to get into the final but didn’t do much better then. I figured out the distance gauging a bit better but I still couldn’t adjust fully to it.
For trout distance I did a couple of test casts. At my third test cast I hit 41 meters, didn’t go longer since I hadn’t more line out. So I felt like I didn’t need to do anything more before the competition started. The first round went well I was over 40 meters, 40.98 according to the results, so a spot in the finals felt secure. In the second round I tried a bit harder and casted a bit shorter. In the final something happened, my technique started to fall a part a bit. Not completely sure what did happen but my deliveries wasn’t any good. I thought the line was like a snake in the air and on the ground. Dangles and sideway tails. I don’t know how but I ended up with 42.16, 41.97 and 40.93 meters in the final. I would say better than those casts deserved. That put me in the fourth place. Six out of eight casters was over 40 meters in the final. So good conditions and great casting!
Seatrout distance was an other story. I thought that my casting here wasn’t totally crap, but the loop that constantly collapsed right before 40 meters told an other story. When it finally felt like I was into to the groove I shoot a decent birds nest into the guides and I was out. I suspect that I can have been screwed by the wind here. I’m not a huge fan of seatrout distance, and Magnus that I casted together with here isn’t either. But Magnus is a great caster and I would expect him to place higher than second last in the event, just a head of me.
Salmon distance is an event that I only practice in competition. That by signing up for the event and borrowing a rod last minute so no warm ups either. But it feels like I’m improving. Just should get a rod and practice it sometimes. Like learning to use both hands as that is the advice I get when casting. “Use both hands”, “you throw far for only using one hand”. The event is quite fun also, at least when you get some decent casts away. I think I might have casted longer if I had more line ready. My longest cast was 55.43 meters, but that only got me to second last place. The others was better.
In my final cast I did really think about raising the rod but and pulling with both hands. And we can say that it worked as I’m quite sure I set one record with that cast. How far anyone has casted a pair of glasses. The line came behind my ear and quite cleanly pulled my glasses off and took them for a flight of about 15 meters. The glasses didn’t break, but it feels awkward to wear them still.
I did also participate in the single handed events of fly in casting sport. Here I also got all my practice in during the event. In accuracy I had an assistant telling me which target that was next and how much I should extend the line. When I entered the wet fly part of the series I had got into it a bit and it was fun to smack the fly down into the targets. Much better for an audience than the trout accuracy. And we should have something similar to the wet fly rounds also.
The distance event of the single handed event could be good practice for seatrout distance. The guys competing in casting sport regularly did really good in the seatrout event also. I might pick up these disciplines also as they were quite fun.
Link to all of the results: https://www.castingsport.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Resultatlista-SM-2025.pdf
And the plan to stay of distance practice after the competition? Nothing as a competition to increase motivation to train the competition specific stuff. But I have other things to focus on for a while now. But I have demo and introduction to trout distance and trout accuracy next weekend so I better prepare a little.
The fishing is also hot right now. I managed to squeeze in about two hours of fishing in-between sickness and bad weather. Ten sea trouts in two hours, not bad. Small ones hitting the fly almost ripping the rod out of my hands, bigger ones with sneaky bites and really fighting back when you push them. The biggest one got away though. It came like a plow after the fly in the surface made a couple of death rolls and it was gone. I got to see some big fins and learn where the big ones hunts in that spot.
Cheers, Rickard