Tracy&James | Sunday, 29 May 2022
It’s been a very busy week or so for Tracy and myself with work, casting and fishing. This started with the BFCC casting weekend at Willesborough, Kent. Usually BFCC events are one day only affairs, however this time we had the pleasure of being joined by a group of great casters from France and Switzerland who had come over to take advice from Mark and Mike with regards to the FFF CI syllabus as well as to compete in the competitions. Both Tracy and I took the opportunity to learn from Malik, a master in the Italian TLT style of casting, who demonstrated an almost psychokinetic control of where the fly was going – I think we both have an awful lot practice ahead if we are to get even to a basic level of proficiency with this style.
It was immediately obvious to me, when seeing these guys cast after the serious business of the CI workshop hadfinished, that they’d be competitive in the next day’s competition. I was proved correct in the first event, the accuracy, when Jerome took a well-deserved win. Francois then experienced the agony and the ecstasy of the T120 – making a huge cast in the conditions to win the event by a large margin, but also feeling the sting of being hit by the dangling end leaving him with a welt across the back of the neck.
On the way home from Kent, I dropped Tracy off so she could go into work whilst I carried on down the M4 into South Wales for a day’s fishing on the river Usk with Dan. I’d fished this beat after the Powys BFCC event and I felt there was a score to settle with the fish there – I’d had plenty of takes but managed to somehow miss them all. I was concerned that this second trip was going the same way as the first having missed my first few takes, however I did eventually land a beautiful Usk trout or two. I also lost a very strong fish that stripped line from my reel but then took it in a big arc, popping the tippet against the pressure of the water. I’m not used to trout pulling this hard in my usual river so perhaps I’ll up my leader strength when I go back.
Today Tracy and I fished the Dee, on a beat that we hadn’t got round to fishing before – I’m not sure why not because it was a lovely stretch. We both fished dries all day, starting with our usual drab klinks and then switching to olive patterns as the sun warmed the water. It was great to see the river alive with insects and we both ended with a good number of trout landed and quite a few misses. Both the Dee and Usk trout are very distinctive as you can see in the pictures.
Have a great week,
James.
